Sony is preserving PlayStation's 30-year history of gaming data through a dedicated project.
Garrett Fredley, a former software engineer at EA who joined Sony's data protection team in 2022, recently explained at GDC 2025 how his team is dedicated to preserving PlayStation's historical game data over the past 30 years. ▲(Image/Taken from Garrett Fredley's personal LinkedIn page) Garrett Fredley pointed out that Sony established a project called "PlayStation Studios Vault" to store data related to the past game development of the PlayStation brand, including various versions of games currently released by PlayStation, original code and creative designs, and related documents. The purpose of Sony establishing "PlayStation Studios Vault" is to preserve all data related to games created by PlayStation studios in the past. In addition to game release versions, original code, design documents, even original concept designs and sound-related content will be preserved, including photos of development team members who participated in the game development. ▲(Image/Taken from Garrett Fredley's personal LinkedIn page) The earliest game data stored in the "PlayStation Studios Vault" project is the 1994 strategy role-playing game "Arc the Lad," while the most recently stored game data covers all PlayStation Studios production content released on the PlayStation 5 platform, including debugging, testing, Alpha testing, Beta testing, and pre-release versions of each game. The "PlayStation Studios Vault" project has so far included more than 1000 games and is stored on two servers located in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, and Liverpool, UK, respectively, occupying a total of 650TB of storage space and containing more than 2 million files. Last year, this capacity was only 350TB, and it is expected that with more new games being released, the storage space occupied will exceed 1PB. However, Garrett Fredley also explained that storing all the game content was not easy. Because many game studios did not properly or in the current way back up the game content they had created, even though Sony's data protection team recorded thousands of game discs using a robot called "Vaultron," many game files could not be backed up successfully. Therefore, an additional indexing tool had to be created to successfully back up the game content.