Digital preservation the hard way

Poster presented at the Open Repositories 2015 conference on June 9, 2015.An awesome tool set for digital preservation is available to all institutions who use DSpace. This is not a story of how we used this tool set. This is a story of how we recovered from an accidental deletion of a significant number of items, collections, and communities--an entire campus's ETDs: 315 missing items, 878 missing bitstreams, 1.4GB of data, 7 missing communities, 11 missing collections--using a database snapshot and a tape backup. The SQL we developed to facilitate this restoration may be helpful, but it is our hope that in comparison, the effort required to implement a proper backup and preservation safeguard, such as DuraCloud and/or the Replication Task Suite, will rightly seem more appealing. In other words: here's how to do it the wrong way, but you'd really be better off doing things the right way. This poster should be sufficient to serve as a guide for actually recovering from an accidental deletion of materials in DSpace, if one only has a database snapshot and a tape backup of a DSpace assetstore. It will also serve as a reminder of the digital preservation tool set available for DSpace, as well as why these tools exist.Includes bibliographical references