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What Hiberden Is

Updated July 4, 2026

What Hiberden Is

Hiberden is verification-first 3-2-1 archive software for LTO tape. It answers three questions about your archived data and keeps answering them: where is it, is it still intact, and has anything changed since you archived it.

The problem it solves

Most archive tools verify a copy once, at the moment it is written, and never look at it again. The tape goes on a shelf and you trust it. Hiberden treats that as the wrong default. An archive is only as good as your ability to prove, today, that the bytes are still the bytes you wrote. Hiberden keeps a live catalog of every archive and every copy, and lets you re-verify any copy on demand by re-reading and re-hashing it.

What makes it different

  • Verification-first. A copy is marked Verified only after Hiberden re-reads it from the destination and re-hashes it against the recorded SHA-256. It is never assumed from a successful write. See What "Verified" means.
  • Drift-aware. Hiberden knows when your live, working copy of a project has changed since the last time you archived it, and shows you, instead of pretending the archive is finished forever.
  • Standards-based. Archives are standard TAR written to standard LTFS tape, with SHA-256 integrity. The format is open: your tapes are readable without Hiberden.
  • Customer-owned. Your data lives on your own tape, disk, NAS, and cloud account. Hiberden orchestrates the copies; it never hosts your data, and there is no SaaS in the path.

What it is not

Hiberden is an archive tool, not a continuous-backup tool, and not a hosted service. It runs on Windows and writes to infrastructure you own.

Start with the 3-2-1 model and Destinations to see how copies are arranged, or read What "Verified" means for the integrity model at the heart of the product.