enad wrote: ↑Thu Aug 18, 2022 7:18 pm
Northern Flicker wrote: ↑Thu Aug 18, 2022 3:04 am
bampf wrote: ↑Thu Aug 18, 2022 1:22 am
I have 30 years in the storage industry.
How many of the files you managed 30 years ago are accessible today?
For grins, I just fired up an old IDE hard drive from the 90's and was able to access many files and folders. The drive has been stored in a cool dry safe for more than 24 years. I haven't tried booting Windows 3.1 but I might. I also fired up my 1980 CP/M system that uses 8" double-sided 1.2 MB floppy disks. Imagine the entire OS fits on the disk and still gave me space to store files. I was able to boot up a disk and play Space Invaders. I have a 5.25" Floppy drives(in a box, last used 5 years ago) and both 3.5" Teac 1.2 MB floppy drive (floppy interface one PC) and the USB version that can be used on modern PC's. The data on floppies written in the mid to late 90's is still there and reading it was not an issue nor viewing some photographs that I should probably put on our NAS. I have since lost the ability to read my 1982 mag tape but the last time I read it I was able to dump the contents of all the files (so there is no loss, just never got around to disposing of it properly). Now the DEC tapes are another story ...
No matter what media you choose there is always someone or a service that can read that media and transfer to another format. I really like dumping the stuff on flash drives, labeling said flash drives and rotating them every 3-6 months and in the meantime lock them up in a fireproof safe. I don't trust others to keep track of my sensitive financial files and that's what happens when you put it in the cloud or someone else's service. You may never hear of the thefts that take place; if you did they'd go out of business.
I started in '94 with IDE hard drives, which I then copied to parallel SCSI hard drives in '96, then copied it over to SATA HDD in 2003, and last but no least to SSD once they got cheap enough (still using SATA procotol).
I do have date on a 1/4 inch tape in UNIX TAR format made in 1983 PDP11/70, but I have no hardware to read it back and it's likely degraded.
In short my strategy is to keep copying over the data to the current widely used format so avoid this kind of technical obsolescence.
There is also the issue of data formats. I can no longer read the term papers I wrote in '95 with a now defunct word processor. I realized this 10 years ago, so now I always export word processor to ASCII text, it's as close as it gets to a universal data format.
PDF is so pervasive now on government documents, official docs etc etc that it's unlikely to become obsolete, but if a new format ever comes out (say NEW-PDF), I'll simply convert all PDF docs to NEW-PDF.
@enad it's really cool you managed to keep old hardware
unfortunately I ran out of space as I had all kinds of stuff at home due to my work as software/hardware eng, so it wasn't practical for me. Although if I had actually owned a 1980 CP/M or the IBM PC XT I would have kept both
Rember QIC 24 tape drives? those were fun
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