ARCHIVED: About data stored on the SDA

This content has been archived, and is no longer maintained by Indiana University. Information here may no longer be accurate, and links may no longer be available or reliable.

Important:

Before storing data on the SDA, make sure you understand the information in Types of sensitive institutional data appropriate for UITS Research Technologies services.

Due to the mammoth volume of data stored on the Scholarly Data Archive (SDA), back-ups are neither practical nor economical. The SDA doesn't have an offline, traditional backup system, so any deletion you perform will cause an irreversible loss of data.

However, to protect against random tape errors, two tape copies of the data are created by default. If one tape fails, data can be retrieved from the other tape. The two copies of data reside at two geographically distant sites (at IU Bloomington and at IU Indianapolis) in two separate tape libraries. Also, two separate metadata backups are performed, at IU Bloomington and IU Indianapolis. As a result, even in the event of a catastrophic disaster affecting either the IU Bloomington or IU Indianapolis site (such as a fire or a tornado), all dual-copy data on the SDA would still be safe.