On 2/14/2015 3:13 AM, Malcolm Smith wrote:
Bruce Walker wrote:
But even relatively modern formats are effectively dead these days.
How many of us could read an 8 inch MDS-80 floppy? A 5.25" CP/M or MS-
DOS floppy? Even finding a PC or Mac with a 3.5" 1.44M floppy on it is
non-trivial lately. In a pinch I can read 3.5" floppies, but I'd have
to spend a couple of hours jury-rigging something together: an old PC
from the basement, running FreeBSD and networked.
I have tried to back up any files I've had stored on - for want of a
better description - dead media formats, to the latest method of
storage. At one point I had loads of 5.25" floppy discs and thousands
of 3.5" discs. I still have some of those from Kodak, where there was
an option of providing a disc with your processed film. I have no way
of opening those discs now, yet because I have the film, it's not
important.
The best time to do that is BEFORE they become dead media. There's
usually a period when use of the new media formats overlaps with the old
media formats.
Before my last computer that supported 5.25" floppies died, I copied the
important DATA to 3.5" floppies. Those, in turn, were copied to CD-ROM
before my last computer with a 3.5" drive was replaced (although I have
since then come into possession of an older computer that has a
functional 3.5" drive). Meanwhile, the DATA is stored on multiple
CD-ROMs and multiple external HardDisk drives.
The other side of the coin though is that much of that old DATA is no
longer important enough to deserve preservation.
--
Science - Questions we may never find answers for.
Religion - Answers we must never question.
--
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.
