[NTLUG:Discuss] CD Turning 25

[Robert Pearson]

On 8/17/07, Robert Citek <robert.citek at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 08/17/2007 02:29 PM, Dennis Rice wrote:
> > As advances are made, it is more difficult to look back.
>
> Not at the data level.  I recently moved all my personal archives of the
> past 15+ years to two 100 GB USB drives (same information duplicated on
> both drives) for under $100. That included floppies, Zips, CDs, and some
> smaller IDE drives.  What's harder is not the media, but the software to
> read those proprietary file formats.  Text no problem.  But anyone got
> WordPerfect?
>
> Regards,
> - Robert

I agree with your point.
FYI, as a practical matter OpenOffice.org Writer shows WordPerfect
"*.wpd" as a file it will open. "*.wpd" was the "document" mode file
format. I used mostly the "non-document" mode so I had a bunch of
".wpf" files. They were fairly easy to convert to text before I forgot
everything I knew about WordPerfect files. Hundreds of lines of source
code.

I've been through this drill several times in several different environments.
Each solution has been unique to that environment due to Political,
Economic and Technical requirements. Political and Economic are about
80% and Technical is, at most, about 20%. Usually less. Like 10%.

In one solution we archived the equipment (disks, tapes, etc.) with
the Information. After the basement filled up and the off-site
auxiliary sites filled up, a change in Management sent all of it to
the Recycling shop for scrap. Including the Information. Very
aggressive Risk taking!

What I have taken away from all these endeavors is the process you
have described.
I store all the Information I think I want to keep on low-cost
external drives. As I migrate from the current machine to a newer
machine (newer technology), I migrate the externally stored
Information. When I went from a mixed shop of Windows and Linux I
migrated the Information from a "vfat" file system to ext3, or
whatever I was using for that Linux.

The Flash drive Information still uses the "vfat" or "FAT16/32"
(depends on the Flash drive) format and will for a long time for
portability in the work environment.

For commercial use I still recommend the "media server" concept. This
little beauty allows "mass quantities" of going out-of-date formatted
media to be converted to the current format. There are companies that
specialize in doing this as a service.