Lazarus Archive
Preservation guides
How Lazarus does its work, written down so that anyone can use it: for a box of disks found in an attic, a family’s photographs or an organization’s thirty years of files.
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First aid for old media
What to do, and what not to do, when you find a box of old disks, tapes or drives.
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Imaging old media
How Lazarus turns a disk, tape, drive or chip into an image that can be kept indefinitely, and why it reads everything more than once.
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Fixity: knowing nothing has changed
How a checksum proves a file is exactly what it was, and how Lazarus checks all 3.1 petabytes of the archive, continuously.
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Emulation and migration
The two ways to keep old things usable, when Lazarus uses each, and what is lost either way.
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Describing what you keep
A catalog record explained field by field, and why the dull parts matter most.
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Deciding what to keep
Appraisal, or the four questions Lazarus archivists ask of everything they are offered.
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Your own digital archive
A practical plan for keeping family photographs, messages and documents readable for the next fifty years.
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Rights and orphan works
How Lazarus decides what it can show, and what happens when no one can be found to ask.