TarTheft is an open-source PACS project that enables users to store, retrieve, and exchange medical images and related data. It is a simple and effective way to manage and share healthcare information.
TarTheft is an open-source software project that provides a picture archive and communication system (PACS) solution. Instead of developing a completely new system, the project team chose to patch the popular subversion tool and make it compatible with a tape library. The software is supported by the Belgian Royal Institute for the Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Heritage (KIKIRPA), which has over 900,000 high-quality black and white and color photos, as well as 300,000 associated documents, used by art historians and restorers for their research.
The challenge for KIKIRPA's IT team was to create an easily accessible and secure digital archive that could host both pictures and associated study materials. Designed for online archiving of large files like pictures, TarTheft aims to create a PACS system that combines disk-based and tape-based archives to achieve both ease of use and efficiency. While disks are more straightforward to use, tape storage is preferred for long-term archiving since data cartridges can last up to 30 years without power.
The solution proposed by TarTheft is "near-line media," a combination of a large hard-drive, a tape-driver, and a tape-changer. In this setup, the disk acts as a cache before being stored on a tape volume. TarTheft uses a version-control system (subversion) for the disk-based cache, allowing it to have several advantages, such as using subversion properties to remember where a revision was backed up on tape, even if the file structure on the hard drive changes.
TarTheft includes four sub-programs, namely servett & svnserve, looktt, scripts, and ttthin, to manage the archive. The software allows external (svn and svn+ssh) access to your archive, and the ttthin program hacks the FSFS repository and removes all the heavy files from it if necessary. To retrieve a TAR from file/tape or assemble revision dumps on tape, you can use scripts like ttextract and ttassemble. The requirements for TarTheft include Subversion 1.4.5.
The latest release of TarTheft introduces support for chopped file extensions, improved documentation, and increased shard depth. All in all, TarTheft is a robust and efficient PACS solution for archiving large files like pictures and associated study materials, thanks to its innovative combination of disk-based and tape-based archives.
The challenge for KIKIRPA's IT team was to create an easily accessible and secure digital archive that could host both pictures and associated study materials. Designed for online archiving of large files like pictures, TarTheft aims to create a PACS system that combines disk-based and tape-based archives to achieve both ease of use and efficiency. While disks are more straightforward to use, tape storage is preferred for long-term archiving since data cartridges can last up to 30 years without power.
The solution proposed by TarTheft is "near-line media," a combination of a large hard-drive, a tape-driver, and a tape-changer. In this setup, the disk acts as a cache before being stored on a tape volume. TarTheft uses a version-control system (subversion) for the disk-based cache, allowing it to have several advantages, such as using subversion properties to remember where a revision was backed up on tape, even if the file structure on the hard drive changes.
TarTheft includes four sub-programs, namely servett & svnserve, looktt, scripts, and ttthin, to manage the archive. The software allows external (svn and svn+ssh) access to your archive, and the ttthin program hacks the FSFS repository and removes all the heavy files from it if necessary. To retrieve a TAR from file/tape or assemble revision dumps on tape, you can use scripts like ttextract and ttassemble. The requirements for TarTheft include Subversion 1.4.5.
The latest release of TarTheft introduces support for chopped file extensions, improved documentation, and increased shard depth. All in all, TarTheft is a robust and efficient PACS solution for archiving large files like pictures and associated study materials, thanks to its innovative combination of disk-based and tape-based archives.
What's New
Version 1.1: N/A