17 May
2003
17 May
'03
2:26 a.m.
On Tue, 13 May 2003, Hills, Paul wrote:
Although the storage medium transferred to may have a
shorter life, the
information itself may have a longer life. As the previous poster said, he
can store all his old 8-bit stuff in a tiny corner of his hard disk. That
can get stored to CD. Now write-able DVD has arrived, it can be copied to an
even smaller corner of a DVD. When the next, even more dense, medium
arrives, it may be copied to an increasingly smaller corner of that. As long
as this copying process occurs more often than the life-length of each
medium, there's no problem. Keeping a copy of each intervening storage media
gives you your backups too.
Great theory, but humans have a proven track record of being notoriously
bad at keeping up with their backups.
There is a danger of leaving the information on the
original only, as
exemplified by the problems with the BBC's (UK) doomsday project
(http://www.si.umich.edu/CAMILEON/domesday/press.html), which fortunately
were solved. Even though it may be theoretically possible to resurrect the
data, it might be very difficult.
That's a bad example. Those folks never thought to look for a thriving
vintage computer community that would be able to provide them with the
parts they needed.
--
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
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