Fixity scans taking too long
Andy Steadham
Hi Fixity users,
I’m interested in hearing from other archives – particularly in the corporate or non-profit world – to hear how you use Fixity and your feelings about scalability as your collections grow.
Here at Rotary, we’re not monitoring a ton of data yet (roughly 700 GB at last count, currently stored on a network drive – a fraction of the digital content we actually have, by the way). I run Fixity scans from my own workstation, either in the background while I’m doing other work or overnight. But the scans typically take days to complete – and any interruption of access to the network means the resulting report is useless.
More recently I have looked into developing multiple Fixity “projects” for groups of collections rather than the whole lot – but early testing suggests that even these smaller scans could take 9-10 hours to complete. And as collections grow this problem is only going to get worse.
How do you use Fixity – do you have multiple projects running automatically or one big project? Do you run Fixity in the background or do you have a dedicated workstation? Do you schedule regular reviews of the resulting reports, or do you only review in detail when something is seriously out of whack? How do you see the product scaling up as your collections grow?
Thanks in advance for your thoughts.
Andy Steadham
Senior Archives Specialist | Heritage Communications
Rotary International