PlayStation Preservation Expert Has Safely Stored Over Half a Petabyte of Sony's Gaming History

An important job

Game preservation is more important than ever. As our industry matures, the thought of losing valuable source code, design documents, and artwork feels unthinkable – but it happens all the time. Sony has taken steps to prevent that, assigning preservation expert Garret Fredley and a few of his colleagues the task of creating a secure archive of all PlayStation games – both past and present.

And in a rare update on X (or Twitter), he revealed this week that the project had officially reached the 500TB milestone.

He wrote: “It’s weird to consider what half a petabyte looks like considering the size of modern AAA titles. It's an honour to preserve it all, but copying hundreds of millions of files is super slow.”

At a presentation in New York City earlier this year, Fredley shared a little more about the objectives of his role.

The PS Studios IP Preservation team, which he oversees, is tasked with establishing preservation practices for future titles and archiving as much information from old games as possible. This resource is designed to be both comprehensive and accessible, presumably so information can be called up on any game at any time.

All of this work will benefit us in the future, as readily available source code, artwork, and resources will make it easier for Sony to re-release software.

More importantly, though, it means this all-important information is less likely to be lost. Considering just how much old source code and artwork goes missing, this is an important project.

We reckon Fredley arguably has one of the more interesting jobs in games right now. While we can appreciate it’s probably a frustrating and tedious task at times, imagine being given the responsibility to archive and catalogue millions of old, presumably mostly unseen, PlayStation-related documents and files? It must be absolutely fascinating to sift through this stuff.

[source x.com]