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Archive Witness is in open beta!

Archive Witness is a conventional desktop application running safely as the signed-in user (NOT as administrator). It requires direct filesystem access to inspect registered archives.

What this beta is validating

The current beta is focused on the core integrity-management model:

• Keep a durable catalog of a large, evolving collection;
• Discover normal filesystem changes without re-reading every file;
• Selectively verify current bytes against accepted, historical, manifest, or peer evidence;
• Review what changed and deliberately accept legitimate changes—without silently discarding the evidence that came before them.

It is intended to answer a practical question before more automation is added: does this make long-term integrity management meaningfully better for the archives you actually maintain?

If Archive Witness solves a real problem for you, beta feedback is especially valuable around what workflow it would replace, what is still missing before you would trust it, and whether a polished version of the product described here—including the planned directions below—would be worth paying for. Send beta feedback.

Where Archive Witness is headed

Two important directions are planned but are not current beta capabilities.

Policy-driven recurring verification. Archive Witness is intended to maintain fixity coverage over time without requiring a manual full-archive scan for every review cycle. The configurable policy would, for example, re-read 30% of an archive every 10 days, rotate fairly through due files, resume interrupted work, and show which content is recently verified, due, overdue, or not yet covered by the active policy. Without user interaction, you will be notified when a mismatch occurs.

Stronger audit and forensic safeguards. Planned work includes clearer human- and machine-readable audit history, stronger provenance and operator/context capture, chain-of-custody-oriented evidence packages, and tamper-evident or signed audit snapshots.

Release channels

Eventually, we will have both Beta and Stable channels. Beta will receive newer test versions before the move to the Stable channel. When there is nothing newer to test, both channels provide the same version. Read Install, update, and switch release channels before changing channels or attempting to return from a newer Beta.

Beta licensing

The pre-production beta uses a renewable seven-day license until the product moves to production. Feel free to share Beta binaries while we are in pre-production.

Once in production, Archive Witness will be one-time purchase for one active Windows device. Pricing has not been finalized.