ArchivistaBox 2019/XII: Multimedia content and more

Egg, December 6, 2019: With Release 2019/XII, music files and videos can now also be archived. ArchivistaDMS also includes numerous new navigation options. The version 2019/XI is rounded off by new editions for self-supporting archives and a convenient check of backups directly on the desktop of each ArchivistaBox.

ArchivistaDMS as digital camera for written documents

ArchivistaDMS customers receive more than a web-based document management system. For more than 20 years, the Archivista solution has offered a data retention concept for long-term archiving. What does that mean? All data stored in ArchivistaDMS is rasterized on-the-fly, i.e. the content is photographed. This ensures that all content remains readable in the long term.

At the end of the last millennium, this was not easy to achieve in terms of data volumes. Today this is no longer the case. Here’s an example: 1 million pages (that’s about 2000 folders) need about 50 GByte space in black and white. A few decades ago, such data carriers were so expensive that the pages were outsourced to external media (keyword CDR).

Today, even a multiple of 50 GByte fits on small SD cards and hard disks under a few hundred GByte there are almost no more. Even hard disks in the two-digit TByte range (10 TByte = 10024 GByte) are available today for several hundred francs / Euro.

For this reason, it has long been very difficult for affordable DMS systems to archive music and videos with reasonable effort. The “old” ArchivistaBoxes also lacked the entire multimedia substructure in order to be able to process corresponding files at all.

Exorbitant amounts of data for sound and film

With the new ArchivistaBox, which is based on the Open Source Desktop AVMultimedia, all tools required for multimedia content are available. However, the amount of data that is generated is still considerable today.

One hour of recording in FullHD quickly requires a few GBytes of data. This is also not surprising: at 3600 seconds per hour and 30 frames per second, 108,000 color images are to be archived per hour.

Film material in 4K resolution (four times the resolution of FullHD) needs somewhere between 6 and 20 GByte per hour. As already mentioned above, those who want or need to archive such material will hardly find DMS solutions on the market. Instead, content is stored unstructured in folders and files.

ArchivistaDMS 2019/XII as new control center

As of version 2019/XII of the ArchivistaBox, the corresponding files can be conveniently managed, archived, searched and extracted via ArchivistaDMS in the browser.

Images are extracted every few seconds for a convenient preview and search. Once, so that the preview in ArchivistaDMS can be carried out much more quickly than if the material had to be viewed, these images are also captured using OCR. Any texts faded in in the film material are thus directly available for a full-text rectification.

In addition, the materials can also be edited directly on any ArchivistaBox. All applications (which can be expanded at will) are available that are also available on the Open Source Desktop AVMultimedia.

Extended navigation in ArchivistaDMS

ArchivistaDMS 2019/XII offers a greatly expanded preview mode for convenient navigation, both in main and side view. In the new preview mode further files can be loaded at any time with the scroll wheel of the mouse (analogous to the previous table view) and in the side view can be browsed with the scroll wheel comfortably by the sides and/or pictures.

ArchivistaDMS also receives new icons that are scalable (keyword SVG). ArchivistaDMS 2019/XII is also visually different from earlier versions.

Self-supporting archives and data backup

With self-supporting archives, an ArchivistaBox can be published for third parties. Of course, the question may be raised here whether self-supporting archives still make sense in the current networking of computers, especially since ArchivistaDMS is a thoroughly web-based solution.

This may be countered by the fact that, for example, in the case of a revision, test centers only need access to the relevant data. Fiduciary firms and law firms also value the ability to create corresponding dossier archives for their clients at any time.

Such archives can be created quickly with any ArchivistaBox and can now be booted much more easily because the new ArchivistaBox desktop is also available here (e.g. convenient setup in the network with DHCP and/or WLAN).

When backing up data, it is now possible to integrate backups on-the-fly at any time in order to check the data live. Until now, a restart was necessary.