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Welcome to the State Archives of North Carolina online tutorial on Bagger,
the file authentication tool.
You are watching Part 3 of a three-part tutorial.
Part 3: Creating and Validating a Bag will take you through the process of packaging your data
and authentically transferring it to the State Archives of North Carolina.
Bagger allows you to create a digital fingerprint of your files
as they originally sit on your computer.
The files are packaged together
with their digital fingerprints and sent to the State Archives,
where we verify and document that the files still match their fingerprints.
There are two terms we will use in this video that you should know...
"checksum"
and "bag"
A checksum is a digital fingerprint of a file. It is a unique string of numbers and letters created
by an algorithm that runs through every byte of your file.
If a single byte in your file changes,
the checksum string, also called a hash, will change completely.
A “bag” is a term used by Bagger and the Bag-It specification,
which was discussed in Part 2 of this tutorial.
A bag simply refers to the package
that combines your files and their checksums together.
You will use Bagger to create bags and verify them before sending them to the State Archives.
If you’d like to learn more about the structure of a bag,
see Part 1 of this tutorial, Bagger Basics and File Authentication.
Currently, the State Archives bags your data onto external hard drives at your facilities,
brings those external hard drives back to our facilities,
and transfers the data from the hard drive to our digital repository servers.
This requires four simple steps:
At your facilities, we create a bag on the external hard drive,
and verify the bag on the hard drive.
We then copy the data from the hard drive to our repository once we've brought it back,
and verify the bag on our repository.
When we are finished, we have an audit trail authenticating the transfer of public records
into the digital repository.
Now that we’ve explained the general workflow,
we’ll take you through the actual process of creating and validating a bag using Bagger.
If you do not already have Bagger installed on your computer or external device,
you may want to watch Part 2 of this tutorial, Downloading and Installing Bagger.
Moving forward, we will assume that you already have Bagger installed either on your
computer or an external device, such as a thumb drive or hard drive.
The screen you’ll be watching is that of a computer running Windows7,
but the interface will be very similar to anyone running XP or Vista.
In this tutorial, you’ll be looking at my computer and the external hard drive that is attached to it.
I have bagger installed on my external hard drive in the folder
called bagger-2.1.2,
and the data that I wish to transfer to the State Archives is located on my desktop.
I plan to create a bag with this data and save it onto my external hard drive.
I will then verify that the bag was created successfully,
and send the hard drive to the State Archives,
where the archivists will copy the bag into their digital repository and verify it again.
First, locate the folder where you installed bagger,
which on my external hard drive is bagger-2.1.2.
Double click on the file bagger.bat.
Bagger may take a moment to start up.
On my external hard drive is a folder called “Bagit_Bag”.
This is where we save all of our bags on the hard drive, just to keep things organized.
I’m going to make sure that this folder has already been created on this hard drive.
Looks like this hard drive doesn't have the BagIt_Bag folder, so I'll create it.
Ok, now we are ready to create a bag in Bagger.
On the main screen, click on “Create New Bag”.
A small dialog box will come up that asks you for the bag version and profile you'd like.
You may leave the defaults in place, which are bag version 0.96 and no profile.
As future versions of Bagger are released, you may see more recent bag versions
indicating that more recent versions of the Bag-It specification,
discussed in Part 2 of this tutorial,
have been integrated into Bagger.
If a more recent version is available from the drop down menu, you may want to select it.
Click OK.
After you click OK, nothing has actually been saved on your computer or on the external hard drive.
An empty bag has been started in Bagger, but you still need to fill the bag with files and save it to your hard drive.
To add files, click on the green circle with the plus sign,
A new dialog box will appear. Select the files and/or folders you would like to be bagged.
You may select as many folders or files from as many places as you like.
Here is a folder that contains analyses of web archiving crawls.
These are the files that I would like to transfer to the State Archives.
The file names here are important but the names and structure of the folders are also important.
Ok, I’ve just selected a folder I’d like to put in my bag, but I forgot to include another folder.
I can simply go back and add more. I can also remove files or folders.
For now, nothing is actually being saved, and I can edit this bag as much as I'd like.
What you see here is more of a to-do list, indicating what will be saved to the bag once you click the save button.
When you have prepared the bag and are sure that you have everything in place, click the “Save Bag As…” button.
Browse to the location you’d like to save your bag, and enter the name of the bag.
This will be the title of the folder that holds the bag
Follow these rules when naming a bag:
Always end the bag name with "_bag"
Don’t use special characters or spaces. Use underscores instead of spaces.
Make the name of the bag meaningful,
so that if you look at the bag another date, you can easily discern the nature of its contents without having to open it.
Include the date the bag was made (today’s date).
OK,
Once you've chosen the destination of the bag, change the tag manifest algorithm and manifest payload algorithm to sha256.
When you are ready, click OK.
When you click OK, your cursor will turn into an hourglass, indicating that Bagger is processing your files.
First, it will fingerprint the files as it generates checksums.
Once it is done generating checksums, a progress window will appear,
and Bagger will begin copying your files onto your external hard drive.
If you are bagging a large amount of data, it may take a long time for the progress window to appear.
When Bagger is finished, a new pop-up window will report that the bag has been saved successfully.
Click OK to see information about your bag.
The location of your bag is at the top of the screen.
Below, you can find two important pieces of information:
the total size of your bag,
and the number of files that you just bagged.
The number of files is represented by the number after the period in the Payload-Oxum.
The number before the period is the octet count,
If that last bit doesn’t make sense, don’t worry. You don't need to know it.
After you have created your bag,
you want to validate it to make sure that the bag just created is in fact valid.
Click on the “Validate Bag” button.
If the bag validates,
a checkmark inside of a green circle will appear at the center-bottom of the window.
Congratulations!
You have created and validated a bag.
You may now close Bagger.
If it asks you to save your bag, say no.
Now, you want to safely remove your external device and send it to the State Archives.
This concludes Part 3: Creating and Validating a bag.