Digital archiving tools

On Sat, Mar 12, 2011 at 13:25, Shoppa, Tim <tshoppa at wmata.com> wrote: By curious coincidence, one of my labmates just asked me for some original data from my Master's thesis, and luckily I have that data backed up on CD-R - from 1999 (Maxell gold-coloured CD-R74, if that makes a difference). Tar.gz files, and still reads fine 12 years later on a modern machine (Mac mini) without special hardware or software. I didn't plan on those being long-term storage, just as a snapshot in case my HD crashes taking all my work with it. Of course, I still have some C64 floppies from the 86-90 timeframe that I can read - but that requires either well-kept original hardware or specialized HW and SW. However, joining this with the discussion of recovering from flash, I believe that while not ideal as long-term storage medium, data on CD-R can probably be recovered by digital archeologists long after a consumer grade cd-rom drive deems it unreadable, provided no grievous harm has been done to it. It might take some effort and specialized knowledge and tools, but it's probably easier than recovering from magnetic media. Joe. -- Joachim Thiemann :: http://www.tsp.ece.mcgill.ca/~jthiem