On 5 Feb 2007 at 10:46, David Cantrell wrote:
Surely the big "problem" is that people
don't think keeping copies of
all the letters they write to their mum is worth bothering with. And
they are entirely correct.
Perhaps, but you're also assuming that one's judgement of things
important is exactly correct. The interesting thing about floppies
is that it's easier to save the used ones than to cull them.
When one migrates hard disk data, the tendency that I've witnessed is
for users to make decisions about what to transfer. The case is
usually that an operating system is also being upgraded and selective
copying is necessary, as old applications will cease to work without
all parts (registry, dlls, etc.) being copied--assuming that the
application will run at all on the new OS.
When I perform migration for friends, I take the old hard drive and
mount it, unconnected in the new box if possible, just in case the
original judgement was wrong. But that will preserve things only as
long as the owner keeps the box around. For some reason, the current
trend is to wipe or destroy hard disks rather than to remove them
from equipment and encourage the owner to put them in a
safe place.
I sometimes wish that I'd have kept all of the BBS-hosted email that
I exchanged with folks like Don Maslin. But it didn't seem important
at the time--and it was on hard disk anyway..
Cheers,
Chuck