Using Virtual Disks and Hamming Code for Data Preservation

Abstract

Digitalizing archives and data happens more and more often. There are many obvious advantages of digital data- it won’t change over time, it is much more compact compared to any analogue representation and it lasts over time. However there are risks concerning digital archives, too. Each media eventually wears out, which may cause errors when accessing the data. In this paper we propose an approach relying on a combination of virtual hard disks and checksums for data preservation.