archive-a-finished-production

name	archive-a-finished-production
category	media
description	Archive a finished production with verified masters, sources, project files, metadata, rights, checksums, retention, and restore evidence. Use when a completed media project must remain reproducible, reusable, or defensible.

archive-a-finished-production

An archive is not complete until a clean operator can restore it.

When to use

• Use after delivery for video, audio, photo, animation, event, or mixed-media work.
• Apply consent, privacy, rights, legal-hold, and deletion rules before retaining everything.

Procedure

1. Define archive purpose, owner, access, rights, retention, deletion, storage classes, formats, and recovery objectives.
2. Inventory approved masters, alternates, captions, transcripts, audio, graphics, fonts, licenses, releases, sources, project files, proxies, and documentation.
3. Remove caches, duplicates, credentials, unnecessary private material, and prohibited sources without deleting required evidence.
4. Consolidate or package project dependencies while preserving original media, structure, timecode, and metadata.
5. Use sustainable master formats and retain proprietary project files plus version information where needed.
6. Create a manifest with stable IDs, paths, sizes, hashes, dates, versions, rights, sensitivity, and relationships.
7. Store at least two verified copies with independent failure domains and controlled access.
8. Restore a representative project and master into a clean environment; verify playback, relink, fonts, captions, and metadata.
9. Schedule fixity, format, rights, retention, access, and restore reviews.

Failure plan

• If a dependency cannot be archived legally, document the gap and a reacquisition or substitution path.
• If restore fails, keep source delivery open and repair the package before declaring completion.

Done

• An archive manifest records files, relationships, versions, hashes, rights, sensitivity, retention, access, and storage copies
• Clean-environment restore and playback tests verify masters, project relink, captions, audio, graphics, fonts, and metadata