Archival-grade imaging for floppy disks, hard drives and any media at risk.

The real risk in “we'll get to it eventually.”

Somewhere in almost every university archive, special collections department or records management office, there's a shelf holding media nobody has opened in years. Floppy disks from a research project that wrapped up before some of your current staff were born. Drives handed over with a donor deposit. A memory card from a digitisation project that lost its funding halfway through.

This is born-digital material — created digitally in the first place, with no paper original to fall back on. It doesn't degrade gracefully. It works, and then one day it doesn't — and by then, the hardware needed to read it has often stopped existing outside a handful of specialist labs.

Most archives already know this. What's usually missing isn't awareness — it's a safe, repeatable, properly documented way to act on it, without a standing digital forensics team on staff or an outsourced vendor relationship for every accession that turns up.

Why typical approaches fall short.

Most institutions currently handle this one of three ways, and each has a real gap.

Hi, I’m Nico — a decade of real casework, turned into a product.

Four jobs, one defensible record.

DF Sentinel 2.0 is an all-in-one hardware-and-software product for reading legacy and modern storage media, verifying its contents, and generating an exportable record of the process. It's continuously developed and refined as environments change and new requirements come up.

No cloud. No uploads. No phone-home.

Most tooling in this space now assumes a network — you upload the disk image, or the case management lives in someone else's cloud, or the licence quietly checks in with a server before it will run. DF Sentinel does none of that.

Every stage — intake, imaging, file inventory, integrity validation, reporting — happens on the machine in front of you. Nothing about your collection is transmitted anywhere. There's no cloud service to procure, no account to create and no third-party data-processing agreement to negotiate, because there is no third party.

That includes licensing: the software doesn't call home to verify itself. Pull the network cable out, or install it on a permanently isolated workstation in a secure room, and every function behaves exactly the same. For material under embargo, donor restriction, commercial confidentiality or data-protection constraints, that's often the difference between being able to process it in-house and not being allowed to touch it at all. More on offline & air-gapped use.

What running it actually looks like.

Six real screens from the application — from opening a case through to the report at the end.

Prefer to click around yourself? Try the live simulator — no install required.

From accession to defensible record.

Institutions usually bring DF Sentinel in as a standing in-house capability, or as a focused project to clear a specific backlog. Either way, the workflow follows the same shape.

Start with a conversation, not a price list.

No two archives look the same, so it all starts with talking to us about your requirements — media types, volume, condition, timeline. We don't publish a price list because we can't responsibly guess what's on your shelves before we know what it actually is: 3.5″ and 5.25″ floppies, Zip and Jaz disks, CDs and DVDs, external hard drives, SD and memory cards, or a NAS box nobody's powered on in years all carry a different scope. That mix is what drives the cost, not a generic rate card. From there, DF Sentinel comes in whichever shape fits — the underlying software, forensic guarantees and reporting stay identical throughout.

What you need to run it.

The practical answers procurement usually asks for first. Full technical specifications.

The guarantees that run through the whole product.

The same rigour used in forensic evidence handling, applied to the legacy-media problem — because that's the standard this lab already works to every day. A software block is reported as exactly that, never dressed up as hardware-grade: we'd rather tell you what the product couldn't do than round a claim up.

The last resort, in the same building.

Imaging software assumes the media still basically works. Sometimes it doesn't — and that's where the rest of the lab comes in.

Who uses DF Sentinel.

Questions from archivists and records teams.

Tell us what you're holding.

There's no price list to request and no sales sequence to enter. This goes straight to the lab, and a real person reads it.

Explore the lab behind DF Sentinel.

DF Sentinel is one product from a working Belfast digital forensics and data recovery lab — the same people, the same standards, applied across everything below.