Moving Your Web and Social Media Archive to a New Provider

Are you considering a website archiving or social media archiving platform but don’t know where to start? Or, maybe your existing digital archiving partner has left you in the lurch and you need to move your web and social archive to a new provider?

No matter your requirements, we can help you.

Today, we’re going to show you how we moved The UK Government’s National Archives to MirrorWeb’s cloud-native archiving solution in two weeks - and how we can move your archive to the cloud quickly and securely too.

Big or Small Datasets: We can Help

Capturing a resource as big as The National Archives takes a lot of space - that’s over 5,000 websites from 1996 to the present, as well as tweets and videos from government social media accounts, with the data footprint of the archive being over 120 TB in 2018.

But you don’t have to be a large, complex organisation to move your archive to our web and social media archiving service. We work with a range of organisations including Financial Services, Brand and Marketing, Public Sector and Government.

No matter the size of your website or social media accounts - whether it’s a single or multiple websites or social accounts, or a small website or social account - we provide the same easy-to-use, state-of-the-art solution to meet your requirements.

Learn how to protect your at-risk digital content in our latest eBook: Archiving the Future right here!

But, why Archive in the Cloud?

The great thing about the cloud is that it is a scalable solution and can cope with small to large amounts of data. It does not need investment in new infrastructure to accommodate growth and this means less costs for you.

As an AWS (Amazon Web Services) partner, we use the cloud platform to linearly scale our infrastructure automatically. This is the same virtual infrastructure used by brands like Netflix and Airbnb, delivering unparalleled capacity.

Using the cloud can make web-based services faster and more reliable, compared to physical hardware which can overload or fail. Cloud infrastructure also has a higher level of redundancy built-in, so if there is ever a problem with a hard drive, server or even data centre, your data can be resumed elsewhere with minimal disruption.

How can I move my archive to MirrorWeb’s cloud-native solution?

You may not be The National Archive and need a 120 TB archive moved to the cloud, but whether you need to move a lot of data or a comparatively small amount of data, this case study shows the extent of data we can transfer and the principles of moving the data remain the same. 

Steps we took to move The National Archive:

• The National Archive data was stored in a data centre in Paris (so it wasn’t too difficult for us to get our hands on the data itself) across 72 USB-3 hard drives.
• We decided our best option for the transfer was to use devices called AWS Snowballs, which connect to your local network, copy and encrypt your data to internal hard drives, and can then be shipped to an AWS data centre for transfer into the cloud.
• To speed things up, we also brought along two of our own custom-built PCs that would allow us to move data from up to sixteen of the USB-3 hard drives at a time.With this ensemble of 72 hard drives, two custom-built PCs and two AWS Snowballs, the entire process took just two weeks – not bad for more than two decades of internet history!

You may have different needs and requirements, which is why we always provide web and social archiving solutions specific to your project.

How much does it cost?

The cost of moving your archive to MirrorWeb’s cloud-native solution will depend on the size of the dataset (e.g. a single or multiple websites) and the frequency of archiving.

For our Financial Services clients, the cost is likely to be more expensive as they have to archive every day. If archiving takes place once a year or once a month, dependent on your requirements, the price would be cheaper for customers.

You don’t need to worry about setup, maintenance or seat fees, or paying for additional infrastructure, and we give you unlimited access to the MirrorWeb portal.

By using cloud-native technology, we do not have to hold huge amounts of data on our client’s behalf and we can increase storage requirements on a project by project basis, passing on significant savings to you.

MirrorWeb: Your Web and Social Media Archiving Partner

By partnering with MirrorWeb, you’ll be using a trusted and secure archiving service provider with extensive experience in understanding your requirements. Our website archiving and social media archiving platform provides a range of benefits, including:

• State-of-the-Art - Offering support for web and social media data at scale, as well as indexing for search and big data initiatives.
• Cloud-Native - We offer near-unlimited capacity and scalability with complete control over data storage.
• ISO-Compliant - We are ISO9001 and ISO27001-certified and archive our data in the secure, date and time-stamped ISO28500 standard WARC file format.
• UK-Based - We offer UK-based support 24/7/365 and store all archives in local territories to meet data protection, compliance and regulatory requirements.
• User-Friendly - Our best-in-class user portal puts users in control of their data, allowing them to control archiving frequency, search and replay content, and view reports and notifications.
• Cost-Competitive - We give full, uncapped access to the MirrorWeb portal at all times, leveraging Cloud economies of scale with no hidden seat fee, no setup and maintenance fees.

How can I get started?

We can offer you a demo of our digital archiving solution, which gives you the ability to crawl your chosen websites and social accounts and store this data in our portal. This gives you full visibility of our tool and the ability to road test the system.

We will show you how to effectively manage your website and social media archive and control your data. From the control of archiving frequency, to searching and replaying content or accessing reports, it'll have everything you need.

Request a demo from MirrorWeb and see how our web and social media archiving solution can meet your needs.