Jostein Øksne wrote: > I think I disagree with your blanket statement that obsolence of either > makes them unrecoverable. If anything, it takes obsolence of both in my > opinion, but in either case it's more a matter of how much you are > willing to pay for recovery. > > What really sucked about analog was that the original could not be > copied at all without quality loss. Digital can be migrated losslessly > between media for as long as you bother to migrate to new hardware > regularly. Like with your tape reader. Since migrating to floppies, > that's your historic 'event horizon'. If then migrated to CDs, why > would you look back to floppies. > > And yeah, ImageMagick is a godsend, but only for us computer geeks. ;-)
It's very likely in 30 or 40 years time, the late 1980s to early 2000s will be the dark ages of family history. Because of our interest here, we are aware of the importance of backing files up and transferring them to the most modern form of storage. I live in an ageing neighbourhood, and you get to see many house clearances. You see the large metal containers outside, which seamlessly transport a person's life by truck to landfill, many with quantities of floppy disks. I can only surmise that a later generation of the family has decided that unreadable = unimportant. Technology has moved at a relentless pace. A few years after I got married, I bought a computer (cutting edge) that the salesman said had a hard drive so large, it would take years to fill. The SD card in my K3 is 128 times larger than that was! For those who found technology left them behind, many important memories are left locked in obsolete storage formats and I suspect most will be gone forever. Malcolm -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
