I worked this week on our Preservation Plan, pulling from our group notes and emails to house pertinent information, brainstorming for possible digital museum tools, and trying to wrap up our work. Last week I reported some averages, but Andy had some good questions: Are we able to get exact numbers by year, and how accurate could these be given the wholes in their archives?

I revisited the inventory list and tallied some very rough year-by-year figures of number of files (Juli is working on a more precise tally). I created a graph to show visually what CreativeWorks is generating a year so we can look at the situation in another light.

Temporary graph of files in CreativeWorks archives.

Andy asked why 2017 is such an outlier. Which raises some other questions: Is 2018 going to be similar since this chart only includes 3 months of files? And if this is the case, then file creation has more than doubled over previous years, and so what does this mean storage and back up issues moving ahead? Or maybe the broken hard drive is housing sets of files that we don’t have access to? Whatever the answers are, I feel like the visuals make a stark statement of what is at stake without a back up and preservation plan in place.

I plan to also create a bar graph for the disk space being used once that information is available.

I am also revisiting the inventory list to make it as useful a document it can be while trying to balance the fact it’s likely most of the content won’t need to be recalled—various version of the same document exist and many of the files lack descriptive names. But at the very least, I think these can be grouped by year then by parent folder.