Tape Ark is set to migrate the West Australian Ballet archives to the cloud.
The company which specializes in mass migration of data stored on tape to the cloud has been awarded a three-year deal to be the Ballet's 'Historical Digital Preservation Partner.'
The migration is in preparation for the West Australian Ballet's 75th anniversary which will fall in 2027, and will see Tape Ark capturing and converting around 3,700 hours of historical video footage.
The video footage is currently stored offline and on tapes by the Ballet, with some of the footage dating back as far as 1970.
In addition to migrating the footage to the cloud, Tape Ark will also be helping the company to explore using artificial intelligence (AI) for facial and music recognition, and to provide the Ballet group with analytical data. This process may face some challenges due to the potentially low quality of some of the footage caused by deterioration or footage being captured on obscure and data recording devices.
Guy Holmes, CEO and Founder of Tape Ark said “For as long as I can remember I have had a deep empathy and kinship with anyone in the creative industry or really anyone at the top of their game in any field. I have walked around always worried about the fact that only one individual on the planet can do what that person does, and what happens to everything they know when they leave us?"
According to Holmes, Tape Ark was created to "capture these valuable contributions so that they can never be lost."
Tape Ark will be storing the footage on an external hard disk as well as in the cloud, with two preservation copies on a new high-density tape for redundancy. Once satisfied, Tape Ark will handle the "confidential disposal" of the original footage.
Lauren Major, executive director of West Australian Ballet said: “West Australian Ballet has such a rich and storied history and we can’t wait to uncover cherished moments and hidden gems that might have otherwise be forgotten. As we approach our 75th anniversary in 2027, it’s more important than ever to preserve the company’s legacy for the future.”
Tape Ark has previously completed migration projects for the UK Met Office in moving its data to Microsoft's Azure cloud, and in April 2024 moved a "significant collection" (over 40 petabytes) of tape-based sports video footage to Google cloud.
