Normally, this talk would be about the experiment, but much has happened in the world of cloud storage since we did it. It reports on an experiment in which we ran a LOCKSS box in Amazon's cloud and recorded detailed costings and compared them with local costs. The paper examines the question of whether the use of cloud storage can reduce the cost of long-term digital preservation. One unpleasant implication is the financial commitment. In the session before this one we saw Universities working through the implications of being asked by research funders to store data for the long haul. This talk describes joint work with my colleague Daniel Vargas, and relies on modelling work I've been doing with Daniel Rosenthal (no relation), Ethan Miller and Ian Adams of UC Santa Cruz, Erez Zadok of Stony Brook University and Mark Storer of NetApp. I believe that video of the talk (and, I hope, the interesting question-and-answer session that followed) will be made available eventually. Below the fold is an edited text of the talk with links to the resources. Or rather, I gave a talk that briefly motivated and summarized the paper and then focused on subsequent developments in cloud storage services, such as Glacier. At IDCC2013 in Amsterdam I presented the paper Distributed Digital Preservation in the Cloud in which Daniel Vargas and I described an experiment in which we ran a LOCKSS box in Amazon's cloud.

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