[NTLUG:Discuss] CD Turning 25

[Robert Pearson]

On 8/17/07, Steve Baker <steve at sjbaker.org> wrote:
> Robert Citek 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?
>
> That's definitely the snag - so read them into OpenOffice (which
> can still read WordPerfect) and write them out in something modern.
> They probably won't retain 100% of their fancy formatting - but the
> raw text will still be there and be legible.  If you don't care too
> much about layout - write them out as vanilla ASCII - it's going to
> be a VERY long time until that will become unreadable!  In fact, since
> disk space it cheap - write them out in ASCII *and* something modern.

We tried ASCII as well.

"Some of my files from college went from punched cards to paper tape
to DEC tape to 9 track to 8" floppy to 5" floppy to 3" floppy to
CD-ROM.  I'm about to remaster all of the CD-ROMs onto DVD-ROM."

We ran into the same problem you must have had if you waited to long
to convert punch cards or paper tape to newer media, even in ASCII. It
wasn't so much the format as something to read the media.

It is getting hard to find 3" floppy drives...  probably not a bad thing

With regard to the "media server" and "went from punched cards to
paper tape to DEC tape to 9 track to 8" floppy to 5" floppy to 3"
floppy to CD-ROM".
The "media server" problem reduces to the Operating System and in
particular the drivers for the media devices. Each OS upgrade you are
forced to do requires updating the drivers for no longer supported
devices. A real PITA...

The trick is to do what you have done. Don't wait too long.

A daunting task if Terabytes are involved. I have about a Terabyte in
my SOHO and I know people who have several Terabytes in theirs.
We might need a good SCM (SOHO Content Management) KISS scheme more
than a media solution.