AN OPERATING SYSTEM INDEPENDENT WORM ARCHIVAL SYSTEM

We describe the organization of a general purpose data archival system for Write-Once, Read-Many (WORM) optical disks. The system has been d esigned for large-scale and long-term data storage and retrieval. The archival system is independent of the operating system, flat, self-con sistent, does not use any write cache on magnetic disk, and allows the exploitation of auxiliary information on magnetic disk, which can be rebuilt immediately in case of a crash, to speed up file retrieval. A library in C language, called pODLIB, has been implemented as a portab le interface to the archival system.