I think it's great to see museum thinking more about long term storage of digital art - this is a topic that I believe will become more important in the 10 years to come, as more artist create digital or online works of art - there might even be interesting opportunities for services that preserve digital art for collectors
It's good that they're planning for their future storage needs to increase drastically. I suspect that 1.2 petabytes will seem like a gross underestimate in 2025, though :)
1.2 million gigabytes ... doesn't seem all that radical. Bigger than my home storage, but only by 500 times. I also have RAID and remote backups with provable error protection.
I wonder where it comes from. I would guess that it's a few small works like software and games, and then a lot of high-res digital transfers of films, scans of 2-D work, and photos of sculptures and installations.
Some of it's 4K video I think.
For sure. I wouldn't be surprised if they had 8K scans of some things, too. I would be curious how much compression their archival system does on top of whatever original format was used.
FFV1 has been gaining popularity as an archival (lossless) video codec. It gets about 2:1 compression. I would guess that higher-res scans would compress better because neighboring pixels would look more similar, but I haven't seen any actual data supporting that. Lossless audio codecs like FLAC also get about 2:1 compression, so I'd use that as a rule of thumb for archival audio & video in general.