| name | migrate-a-media-archive |
| category | media |
| description | Migrate a media archive while preserving bit integrity, metadata, relationships, rights, access, retention, and rollback. Use when moving production assets between storage, archive, or asset-management systems. |
migrate-a-media-archive
Prove that every expected object and its meaning survive the move before decommissioning the source.
When to use
- Use when masters, sources, projects, proxies, captions, metadata, rights, or archives move to a new storage or management system.
- Use ordinary copying for bounded files whose inventory, relationships, rights, and long-term retrieval do not change.
Preconditions
- Confirm archive, editorial, rights, security, privacy, records, IT, and business owners.
- Obtain source inventories, schemas, storage health, checksums, permissions, retention, legal holds, retrieval patterns, costs, and target capability.
Procedure
- Build an asset and rights inventory across files, versions, derivatives, projects, captions, transcripts, metadata, owners, licenses, holds, and restrictions.
- Classify preservation master, production source, proxy, derivative, duplicate, orphan, and disposal candidate.
- Define metadata mapping for identifiers, hierarchy, relationships, timecode, technical data, descriptive terms, rights, access, and provenance.
- Generate or verify source checksums and export immutable migration manifests.
- Test target format, object size, path, naming, API, search, playback, access, retention, and restore behavior.
- Migrate in bounded cohorts with retry, idempotency, quarantine, and no source mutation.
- Perform fixity validation for bytes, object counts, metadata, relationships, rights, captions, and representative playback.
- Reconcile missing, extra, duplicate, corrupt, denied, and transformed objects after each wave.
- Rehearse rollback of catalog pointers and workflows while preserving target evidence.
- Decommission source only after retrieval, legal, retention, user acceptance, and rollback gates expire.
Failure plan
- Pause for unexplained checksum, count, metadata, rights, or access differences.
- Quarantine corrupt sources and preserve both original evidence and recovery attempts.
- Keep the source read-only and available through the approved rollback window.
- Never transform preservation masters silently to fit the target.
Worked example
A broadcaster moves two petabytes from tape catalog plus object storage into a media asset system. The inventory finds captions detached from programs, reused filenames, expired music rights, and preservation masters with no checksums. Stable archive IDs and a metadata crosswalk preserve relationships. Each cohort compares bytes, counts, rights, and playback. One codec cannot preview in the target, so the master remains unchanged and a proxy is generated. A rollback rehearsal restores old catalog pointers before any tape retirement is approved.
Done
- An archive migration register contains asset and rights inventory, metadata mapping, manifests, waves, exceptions, and owners
- A fixity and rights report verifies checksums, counts, metadata, relationships, permissions, captions, retention, and playback
- A cutover and rollback rehearsal records workflow movement, source restoration, evidence preservation, retrieval, and decommission gates
