Finished print files, kept in order
Linnet Cloud keeps the finished working files of regional print shops across the United Kingdom. Master scans, colour separations, proof sets and imposed page files go into the archive once a job has been approved at press, and they come back out unchanged when the shop asks for them. We have worked this way since 2009, from one room with two racks, a checksum server and a cold store that we rebuilt in 2019.
Most of what we hold is very large. A single job from the 1990s is often a few hundred megabytes of scanned sheets. A set of colour transparencies scanned at full resolution runs to several hundred gigabytes, and the largest closed set in the archive is a run of poster masters at 1.1 TB. We keep a parish newsletter and a whole regional calendar series in the same catalogue, and we describe both with the same fields.
The catalogue lists each closed set with its reference number, its formats, its file count and its size on disk. The formats page explains what we accept and what a sheet weighs at 600 ppi. The intake desk page sets out how a set is logged, checksummed and written up before it reaches the shelf. The replication page describes the second copy and how it is checked.
