Sony has a PlayStation preservation vault that contains over 200 millions files

It turns out that in the spirit of game preservation, Sony is actually tackling this challenge head-on. As confirmed by GamesRadar who attended a talk at Game Developers Conference in San Francisco recently, Sony has a "mineshaft vault" of files that date as far back as 1994, and that even the top executives of the company do not have access to.

Known as the PlayStation Studios Vault, this is designed as a place to bring together the company's history and to securely contain it in one place. Senior build engineer Garrett Fredley explained how this is structured in further detail.

"PlayStation Studios Vault is our solution for bringing all of PlayStation's rich, 30-year history together in one place. Not just backups, not just source code and source art, but everything that was ever related to a project we can possibly find, from documentation to audio assets and prototype information, anything under the sun."

As it stands, there are said to be over 200 million files of data stored in the vault, of which exists with two access points currently; one in Liverpool and one in Las Vegas. The actual location of the vault is not referenced or even marginally mentioned, but Fredley does comment on the physical element by adding:

"All 30 years of history reside in our tape backups. And yes, for anyone in the room who knows anything about tape backups, you probably just shivered. We still use them, unfortunately. They'll never go away. They go into a mineshaft somewhere. That's not a joke. They go into a mineshaft somewhere, so you can imagine how long it takes to get them back."

The oldest file in the vault is an Arc the Lad build that is dated for as far back as 1994. While that's exciting, don't expect the vault to go public in the future, as Fredley notes, "We help preserve stuff. We don't decide what happens to it."