21 Oct
2007
21 Oct
'07
2:31 a.m.
Al Kossow wrote:
Exactly. There's not much point saying "I have this" when you don't know
if
"this" is still viable. There seems little point in keeping media on shelving
either, except for ease of sorting and identifying things which might be "the
same" (which is somewhat misleading anyway - I'm forever finding media where
the contents bear no resemblance to what's actually written on the label)
Again with museum hat on, one of my worries is not the archival of this stuff,
but the subsequent need to recreate the content - typically there's little or
no redundancy at the bridge between old world and new (i.e. I think we only
have one SCSI drive which can be easily hooked up to a PC in order to read and
write certain classes of disk pack - if it fails then it has implications for
the running of any system requiring those packs).
I think it was probably Dave D. who came up with the idea of some form of
'registry' listing who could handle reading and writing certain types of media
- in light of the above, that seems like a rather good idea...
cheers
Jules
Yep, went
through that at the museum because some people were advocating
putting media on the archive shelves - but it's not an idea I'm a fan
off; the stuff's just too prone to damage and decay.
Unless you recover the data, what you have is a physical artifact of a
magnetic storage medium. There is absolutely no way to say what, in fact,
is even on it until you read it. Bits aren't preserved if they exist on
only one physical medium, which you may not be able to recover in the
future.