Why
I got tired of fighting my own archive tools.
I spent close to a decade managing petabyte-scale datastores for media companies. The archives were mission-critical: lose a master and you don't get it back. The tools I had to do it with were the opposite of reassuring, expensive to license, complicated to run, and priced as if every terabyte were a fresh negotiation.
I wanted an archive tool that treated durability as the default instead of an upsell, that I could actually afford to run at scale, and that never held my own data hostage. I couldn't find it, so I built it.
How
A tape spine, every copy verified, one catalog.
Hiberden writes to LTO tape through standard LTFS and, in the same pass, lays down the local, NAS, and cloud copies a real 3-2-1 plan needs. Every copy is read back and checked against a fingerprint of the original before it counts as done, and all of it is tracked in one catalog that lives on your machine, not on a server we run.
The formats are open on purpose. Tapes are ordinary LTFS; disk and cloud copies are ordinary files. Your data restores without Hiberden, so nothing you archive is ever locked to us. That's the whole design in a line: write once, verify everything, stay portable.
Who
Built by someone who ran these archives.
I'm Jason Jacoby. For nearly ten years I was the person responsible for petabyte-scale media archives, the kind where a single lost file is a very bad day and "we think it's backed up" is not an answer. Hiberden is the tool I wish I'd had then.
The Internet is not new to me either: I ran Tempest Telecom from the mid-1990s until 2012, getting travelers and remote teams online over dial-up, WiFi, and satellite back when connectivity itself was the hard part. And I still write the code. Hiberden is designed and built by me, from the tape layer up.
I build it in the open and I stand beside it, by name: find me on LinkedIn. Hiberden carries a decade of hard-won opinions about what archive software should never make you do, and none about how to squeeze you once your data is inside.
The name
Hibernate your archive.
Hiberden is hibernate plus den: a warm, safe place where something valuable sleeps through a long winter and wakes up whole. That's the bear on our mark, and it's the promise of the product. Your data goes to sleep on tape, protected by the copies around it, and it's exactly what you stored when you come back for it years later.
The rest of the brand follows from that. Calm, not loud. Warm, not clinical. Built to still be here in a decade, like the archives it looks after.
See it work on your own data.
Run the full product free for 30 days, every feature on, no card required. Or read the Knowledge Base to see archiving, verification, and restore step by step.
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