Carl Watts

I'm the person you call when your “simple storage project” turns into a 32-petabyte migration, a tape library with opinions, and a million tiny edge cases that nobody budgeted for. I’m an Information Technology Specialist and Storage Subject Matter Expert focused on large-scale digital preservation, data migration, and the operational reality of keeping archives alive when the hardware is aging, the budgets are finite, and the data just keeps multiplying. Over the last few decades, I’ve worked across enterprise and government environments where “oops” is not an acceptable recovery strategy—designing and running systems that move, verify, and protect massive collections across tape, disk, and object storage. A lot of my work lives in the messy middle: dual-stack operations, fixity verification at scale, automation that has to survive real production conditions, and reporting that leadership can understand without a decoder ring. These days I spend a lot of time building migration envi