Preserving the Music of Austin City Limits

Austin City Limits

KLRU-TV, Austin PBS created Austin City Limits 42 years ago and has produced it ever since. Austin City Limits is the longest-running music series in television history. Over the years, KLRU accumulated over 550 episodes and thousands of hours of unaired footage stored on videotape. When KLRU decided to preserve their collection they turned to Backblaze for help with uploading and storing this unparalleled musical anthology in Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage.

Upload: Backblaze B2 Fireball

KLRU started their preservation efforts by digitizing their collection of videotapes. After some internal processing, they were ready to upload the files to Backblaze, but there was a problem—one facing many organizations with a stash of historical digital data—their network connection was “slow.” It was fine for daily work, but uploading terabytes of data was not going to work.

“We would not have been able to get this project off the ground without the Backblaze Fireball.” —James Cole, KLRU

Backblaze Fireball to the rescue. The Fireball is a secure, shippable, data ingest system capable of transporting up to 40 terabytes of data from your location to Backblaze where the data is ingested into your Backblaze B2 account. Designed for those organizations that have large amounts of data locally that they want to store in the cloud, the Backblaze Fireball was just what KLRU needed to get the project started.

Preserve: Live Archive With B2 Cloud Storage

The KLRU staff is working hard to digitize and restore their entire musical archive and they are committed to preserving their data by having both a local copy and a cloud copy of their files. By choosing Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage versus a near-line or off-line storage solution KLRU now has an affordable live archive of their data they can access without delay anytime they need.

You can read the entire Austin City Limits case study for more details on how KLRU used B2 Cloud Storage as part of their strategy to preserve their entire catalog of Austin City Limits content for future generations.

Dave Grohl Austin City Limits performance

About Andy Klein

Andy Klein is the Principal Cloud Storage Storyteller at Backblaze. He has over 25 years of experience in technology marketing and during that time, he has shared his expertise in cloud storage and computer security at events, symposiums, and panels at RSA, SNIA SDC, MIT, the Federal Trade Commission, and hundreds more. He currently writes and rants about drive stats, Storage Pods, cloud storage, and more.