Sony has been backing up its PS5 game builds as part of a preservation effort

Back in 2022, Sony hired Garrett Fredley to join its then newly formed Preservation team, which has been working to find and save documentation of PlayStation’s 30-year history since then. Now, Fredley spoke at Game Developers Conference to give an update about his team’s efforts. In his Game File newsletter, Stephen Totilo has shared the details about Fredley’s talk. Apparently, the team formed what it’s calling the PlayStation Studios Vault to store everything it could find about Sony’s game-making history.

The Vault now houses game builds, source code and source art, but it has all kinds of other files, as well. Fredley explained that it was created to preserve “everything that is ever related to a project you can possibly find: from documentation to audio assets, to prototype information, anything under the sun, even cultural artifacts.” If it’s adjacent to a PlayStation studio game, the team will store it in the Vault — even photos of developer teams that made the game. Currently, the oldest item in the team’s collection has a 1994 timestamp and was from the tactical RPG Arc the Lad. The latest files include every customer-facing PS5 build of every PlayStation Studios game, as well as every debug, testing, alpha, beta and milestone releases. It has over 1,000 builds saved.

At the moment, the Vault has two main servers located in Las Vegas, Nevada and Liverpool, England, which store 650 terabytes of data, or around 200 million files. That’s almost double the 350 terabytes of data Fredley said the team gathered during another one of his talks last year. He expects to quickly go over the 1 petabyte of cloud server storage data the team’s current setup can handle, especially since more and more games are being developed.

The preservation team uses tools to help its work, including a robot called Vaultron that can read thousands of discs to find files. But it still hasn’t been easy, since most studios don’t exactly store their files in a way that makes them understandable and accessible decades from now. Going forward, Fredley and his team will have to solve a few problems that they’re expecting to pop up. They’ll need to have good indexing tools, for instance, and figure out a way to maintain the ability to use the files they collect.