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Projects, Archives, and Destinations

Updated July 4, 2026

Hiberden keeps two ideas separate: how you organize your data (Projects, Collections, and Archives) and where its copies are stored (Destinations). This page covers both.

The three levels

Hiberden organizes your data in three levels: Project, then Collection, then Archive.

  • Project is the top-level container, and it is where protection lives: a Project owns a policy that says how many copies to keep and on which Destinations.
  • Collection is an organizational container inside a Project. Collections group your archives the way that makes sense to you, and they can be nested. They are a catalog convenience and do not appear in the physical paths written to media.
  • Archive is the unit Hiberden actually writes to media. An Archive is a single sealed set of files (a standard TAR) that gets copied to your destinations and verified.

The Archive is the seam

The Archive is the boundary between the catalog world and the frozen contents. Above it, in Projects and Collections, you are organizing. At and below it, you are looking at what was actually written.

A note on the word "Folder"

In Hiberden, "Folder" means only a real directory inside an Archive: the actual file-system folders that were captured when the Archive was written. Your organizational containers are Collections, never "folders." Keeping the words separate keeps it clear whether you are looking at how you arranged things (Collections) or what was really on disk (Folders inside an Archive).

Destinations: where copies are kept

A Destination is a place Hiberden can keep a copy of an Archive. You configure a shared pool of Destinations once, then a Project's policy binds copies to them.

  • Tape is LTO tape accessed through LTFS: your archival spine and, once a cartridge is removed, an air-gapped offsite copy. See Supported hardware.
  • Local disk is a drive on the machine running Hiberden. Fast to restore from.
  • NAS is a network share (a UNC path or a mapped drive). In many shops the NAS holds the canonical live copy that archives are compared against.
  • Cloud is your own S3-compatible object storage account. See Supported cloud providers.

How destinations are used

A policy on a Project lists the copies you want and points each one at a Destination from the pool. When you archive, Hiberden writes a copy to each bound Destination and tracks them independently, so you can see and re-verify each one on its own. Because all four kinds are bundled, a single Archive can land on tape, disk, NAS, and cloud at once to satisfy the 3-2-1 model.

Every Destination kind is verified the same way: by re-reading the stored copy and re-hashing it. See Verified 3-2-1 Archiving.