The need for preservation aware storage: A position paper

Digital Preservation deals with ensuring that digital data stored today can be read and interpreted tens or hundreds of years from now. At the heart of any solution to the preservation problem lies a storage component. This paper characterizes the requirements for such a component, defines its desirable properties and presents the need for preservation-aware storage systems. Our research is conducted as part of CASPAR, a new European Union (EU) integrated project on the preservation of data for very long periods of time. The position presented was developed while designing the storage foundation for the CASPAR software framework.