On Thursday 05 December 2024 11:39:21 am wn4isx via groups.io wrote:
I warned him about the various ways hard files die, CD/DVD ROM rot, how audio tape can have the binder (glue) that holds the magnetic material (fancy rust) and become unusable.
I bought a tape drive some years back, and have some tapes around somewhere or other. I was discouraged from using it because of the noise that it generates, I'd never seen anybody talk about the really annoying loud whine that it makes while running. I also have a couple of boxes of tapes, in two formats (large and small) but no drive to run the larger ones. Comments that I've seen here and there suggest that the drive belts contained within the cartridges might be a problem. I don't know. I've bought a 100-pack of writable CDs, still have some of those left, and a 50-pack of writable DVDs, ditto. Somebody just gave me some more of both of these. I use them occasionally but neither one is really practical for backing up a 4TB server drive.
(...)
Most of us don't give much thought to preservation of archival data but maybe we should.
Yup.
(...)
NOTE: I've avoided Apple products and have no idea what magic key strokes he's describing...and I'm happy to remain ignorant.
Ditto. I had one IIc some years back, gave it away. Had a PowerPC mac, scrapped it. There's a complete IIgs system out in the garage, it even has two sizes of floppy drive with it, I've never fired it up. I hear those have some nice sound capabilities.
Several friends have contacted me over the last 20 years with I-Omega zip drives with "Data I have to recover!"
I wished them luck and told them I have zero experience with zip drives and intend to keep it that way.
Got one of those out in the garage along with some disks, and no inclination to connect it to anything.
I have had CD-R/DVD-R fail and 1 early commercial CD music disk lose 2 tracks. I was a bit irritated but found a new CD and tossed the old one.
I can't say that I've had that experience yet. It seems to be the drives that are a problem for me more often. Got boxes of those, too.
I have a large "archive." [if such a mess of unorganized data can qualify as an archive.] I haven't lost a drive, yet. I'm in the process of pulling the most important data to new hard drives. Since I have several Exabytes of data...yea it's a lot of unfun.
Ii have a fair pile of stuff too, though I wouldn't say it amounted to anything near that much. I'd call it semi-organized. :-)
I did post a while back wondering why a bunch of the older hard drives I have in boxes won't show as connected when I hook them up with an external interface. You can (sometimes) hear the drive spin up, sometimes you get the impression that the drive is doing some kind of initialization, but the computer just doesn't see that there's a drive there, for some reason. I didn't get much response to that post wondering what it is that fails on those. I notice that recycling companies seem to put a bit more value on "hard drive circuit boards" than on other stuff, I'm not sure why...
--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, ?a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. ?--Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
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Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin
