CERN Services for Long Term Data Preservation

In this paper we describe the services that are offered by CERN for Long Term preservation of High Energy Physics (HEP) data, with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) as a key use case. Data preservation is a strategic goal for European High Energy Physics (HEP), as well as for the HEP community worldwide and we position our work in this global content. Specifically, we target the preservation of the scientific data, together with the software, documentation and computing environment needed to process, (re-)analyse or otherwise (re-)use the data. The target data volumes range from hundreds of petabytes (PB – 10^15 bytes) to hundreds of exabytes (EB – 10^18 bytes) for a target duration of several decades. The Use Cases driving data preservation are presented together with metrics that allow us to measure how close we are to meeting our goals, including the possibility for formal certification for at least part of this work. Almost all of the services that we describe are fully generic – the exception being Analysis Preservation that has some domain-specific aspects (where the basic technology could nonetheless be adapted).