When Should I Make Preservation Copies of Myself?

TL;DR

This paper explores how different preservation policies impact the effectiveness of autonomic digital objects in maintaining data integrity, using simulations of small-world graphs to compare resource use and preservation quality.

Contribution

It introduces a framework for evaluating preservation policies in digital objects and demonstrates that aggressive policies optimize resource use and preservation outcomes.

Findings

Most aggressive policies use fewer messages than moderate ones.

Distributed host resources are best utilized under aggressive preservation policies.

Simulation results cover graphs with 10 to 5000 digital objects.

Abstract

We investigate how different preservation policies ranging from least aggressive to Most aggressive affect the level of preservation achieved by autonomic processes used by smart digital objects (DOs). The mechanisms used to support preservation across different hosts can be used for automatic link generation and support preservation activities by moving data preservation from an archive centric perspective to a data centric preservation. Based on simulations of small-world graphs of DOs created using the Unsupervised Small-World algorithm, we report quantitative and qualitative results for graphs ranging in size from 10 to 5000 DOs. Our results show that a Most aggressive preservation policy makes the best use of distributed host resources while using one half of the number of messages of a Moderately aggressive preservation policy.