archiving data, was RE: Media Longitevity/Care

Jim Leonard wrote: As has been pointed out, that's rarely an issue in production environments. Info gets migrated to new storage _formats_ long before the current media's integrity comes into play. Sometimes that migration can be interesting. When I went to work at University of Texas, my department had a large file cabinet full of archives. A lot of that dept's publications are funded by state and federal money, so the research lab is required to archive all files and information associated with subsidized publications for 40 years. The first problem was that almost all their archives were on QIC-80 and QIC120, and the only tape drive in the building was a 4mm DDS drive. I had to go over to Surplus and scrounge a floppy-interface Q120 drive. Then I found that the first problem wasn't the main problem - nobody in the building knew how those tapes were made. Fortunately the QIC120 drive was in a 486 system, and the Surplus guy wouldn't let me strip it, so I ended up with the Jumbo software on its disk and that was what I needed. Then the other issue was the archived files themselves. Some of it was in PageMaker, some in Wordstar, some in MS-DOS .prn files, and a lot of it in AutoCAD r12 and a freeware DOS GIS tool whose name I've mercifully forgotten. I spent several hundred hours sorting backup sets, restoring them to disk, migrating files into current formats, and then archiving both current and original copies to 4mm tape. It made for some very soothing afternoons, hidden in my office. Doc