Preserving physical media such as film, tapes, and archival materials requires far more than a locked door and an asset register. It demands a rigorously controlled environment and built-in redundancy to safeguard against unexpected failures.
At Preferred Media, resilience isn’t an afterthought; it’s engineered into every layer of our physical storage infrastructure otherwise known as the Preferred Media Vault.
What Is N+1 Redundancy?
N+1 redundancy means that for every critical system in our vault (N), there is at least one standby component (+1) ready to take over instantly if the primary system fails. This design eliminates single points of failure and ensures uninterrupted protection for your assets.
Why Redundancy Matters
Environmental threats – such as humidity and temperature fluctuations – can silently damage physical media. A single malfunction in climate control could put irreplaceable collections at risk. Our N+1 design ensures this doesn’t happen.
How We Apply N+1 Redundancy
- Climate Control: Two air conditioners maintain stable temperature, even during maintenance or unexpected outages.
- Humidity Management: Following our August upgrade, two industrial-grade dehumidifiers now operate to maintain optimal humidity levels at all times.
- Security Layers:
- Physical: Roller shutters and cage bars reinforce all windows and doors. Vault access is restricted to authorized personnel only via swipe cards.
- Digital: 24/7 CCTV coverage inside the premises and around the building, combined with Back-to-Base Alarm Monitoring by a Grade 1A Control Room, ensures continuous surveillance and rapid response.
- Physical Asset Management System: Our internal asset management platform operates on geo-redundant servers, ensuring data integrity and operational continuity even in the event of a localized failure.
- Personnel Redundancy: Our trained vault personnel work in overlapping roles, ensuring that if one team member is unavailable, another can immediately step in to maintain security, environmental monitoring, and operational continuity.
Optimal Conditions for Preservation
Our vault is maintained at an average temperature of 18°C and relative humidity of 38%, conditions recommended for long-term preservation of tapes, film, and other physical media. These parameters prevent mold growth, chemical degradation, and warping—ensuring your assets remain stable for decades.
To further protect against sunlight and UV exposure, the vault has no windows, and all lighting is sensor-controlled, ensuring lights are only active when necessary. This minimizes UV risk and helps maintain optimal preservation conditions.
Continuous Improvement for Your Peace of Mind
From advanced monitoring systems to air-gapped storage and enhanced humidity control, every improvement we make is designed to keep your physical media safe for decades to come.
We maintain a Business Continuity Plan (BCP) that outlines procedures for disaster recovery and operational resilience. The efficacy of our N+1 redundancy and monitoring systems is tested periodically, ensuring that when the time comes, failover mechanisms and contingency processes are well rehearsed and work exactly as intended.
Whilst we hope the redundant systems are seldomly needed, you can be sure that if a business continuity event or primary system failure does occur, your archived materials remain safe, secure and well cared for.
Having visited many private archive facilities locally and around the globe, we consider the Preferred Media Vault to be the best storage facility in Sydney for long term storage of media assets and other climate sensitive materials. Contact us if you would like to know more.
