Why Optical Disc Archive? [sponsored]

Optical Disc Archive - Gen 2 coming this year!

Archiving is a vital part of any content business and the good news is that it has just got both easier and better.

Archiving is a vital part of any content business. Without it, there’s no guarantee that you’ll be able to find important material that you need for your next project. You might even struggle to make alterations demanded by a client to the project you’ve just finished.

Above all, you have no way to preserve the value of your content. Your material is only valuable if you can retrieve it quickly and safely. You need to have a strategy for archiving.

There’s some good news here. Archiving just got easier and better.

In the past, archiving had an at least partly justified reputation for being difficult and unreliable. What happens if you want to restore a tape in ten or fifteen year’s time? And if you want to retrieve something tomorrow, how easy will it be?

Sony’s Optical Disc Archive (ODA) answers these problems, by ticking these four essential boxes.

Standards based, open and format independent

Optical Disc Archive is based on UDF, the open, vendor-neutral file system that’s used in CD, DVD and Blu-ray Disc and now with the new Archival Disc format from Sony and Panasonic. Optical Disk Archive is not an evolutionary dead-end. In fact Blu Ray is now seen as one of the best options for long term storage. Large internet corporations like Facebook are considering using it for storing data that you don’t need to access regularly and which must remain accessible over long timespans.

With Dual Vendor support (Sony and Panasonic) the new Archival Disc format, of which ODA is part, is an ultra-reliable format with more than a 50 year lifespan.

Quick, easy file access

Optical Disc Archive works like a hard drive, but it’s much more permanent. Removable ODA cartridges are available in capacities from 300 GB up to 3.3 TB, with a choice of re-writable and write-once formats. Use Optical Disk Archive with Sony’s Media Navigator software and you’ll be able to find your archived content as easily as if it’s on your local hard drive.

The dependable long term choice

Optical Disc Archive keeps your precious data safer for longer with a guaranteed 50+ years archival life. The laser-based contactless media also offers excellent resistance to temperature changes, humidity, dust and water. There’s no fast forward or rewinding: this is a disk, not a tape. It’s never going to jam, tangle or snap.

Backward compatible, ready for the future

Enjoy the best backward compatibility of any archive format. The optical cartridge maintains backwards read compatibility with future optical disc drives, with a clear roadmap to generation 2 and 3 drives. Once you’ve made your archive, it’s always your archive.

Sony’s ODA is right at the centre of the new movement towards using Blu-ray for long-term archive. It’s one of the longest lived, most open archival choices you can make. Sony’s generation 2 of ODA, compatible with Archival Disk Format, will be shipping early in the second half of this year.

See http://www.sony.co.uk/pro/products/solutions-archiving for more details.