Previously worked as a software engineer at EA and joined Sony's data protection team in 2022Garret Fredley, recently explained during the GDC 2025 Game Developers Conference how its team is committed to preserving historical game data from the PlayStation brand over the past 30 years.
Garrett Fredley pointed out that Sony has established a project called "PlayStation Studios Vault" to store information related to the production of past PlayStation brand games, including various versions of games currently released by PlayStation, original coding and creative designs, as well as related file content.
Sony established the "PlayStation Studios Vault" with the goal of preserving all the information about game content that the PlayStation studio has created in the past. In addition to game-related release versions, original coding, and design documents, even the original concept design and sound-related content will be preserved, including photos of the development team members involved in developing the game.
The oldest game data currently stored in the "PlayStation Studios Vault" project is the 1994 strategy role-playing game "Arc the Lad" (アークザラッド), while the most recently stored game data covers all PlayStation Game Studios production content released on the PlayStation 5 platform, including each game's debugging, testing, alpha testing, beta testing, and pre-release version content.
The "PlayStation Studios Vault" project has included more than 1000 games to date and is stored on two servers located in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, and Liverpool, UK, occupying a total of 650TB of storage space and more than 2 million files. Last year, this capacity was only 350TB. It is expected that with the addition of more new games, the storage space occupied will exceed 1PB.
However, Garrett Fredley also explained that storing all game content is not easy, as many game studios do not properly back up their previously produced game content or do not use the current storage method. Therefore, even though Sony's data protection team records the data of thousands of game discs through a robot called "Vaultron", there are still many game files that cannot be successfully backed up. Therefore, additional indexing tools must be established to successfully back up the game content.
