Archiving Public Records

by Lowell Rapaport

We are in the process of archiving real estate records in our county clerk's office. How do we store them so they can't be tampered with? Should we use a magneto-optical system, RAID 5 or burn the images onto DVDs or CDs?

Chris Peikert

Network Administrator, Matagorda County, TX.

Any unerasable optical format such as magneto-optical write-once, read-many disks (WORM), CD-R or DVD-R will be inherently tamper proof. Regulations often require that government and financial records be stored on such unerasable media.

Archiving on CD-R or DVD-R is less expensive than a magneto-optical system up front, but if you require long-term storage, you should plan to duplicate the entire collection every few years. While CD-R and DVD-R media can last a long time, the most rugged, dependable and long-lived medium for long-term archival storage is magneto-optical WORM.

RAID systems are generally used to cache frequently used images and data for fast online access. You should use a RAID-5 subsystem only if guaranteed uptime is a must. Otherwise, you can save money with a RAID-0 array because it can be implemented in software rather than through the hardware controllers required for RAID-5.