21 Oct
2007
21 Oct
'07
11 a.m.
Archival preservation of software
Chuck Guzis cclist at sydex.com
<mailto:cctalk%40classiccmp.org?Subject=Archival%20preservation%20of%20softw
are&In-Reply-To=471ABEF2.50308%40bitsavers.org>
Sat Oct 20 22:16:48 CDT 2007
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________________________________
On 20 Oct 2007 at 19:52, Al Kossow wrote:
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.
Exactly. I'm starting to see a trend with some brands of floppies
more than 25 years old where the oxide is starting to separate from
the substrate, leading to fouled heads and "see through" tracks.
Mostly on Wabash brand floppies currently, although a few off-brands
such as "Precision" seem to also be showing this behavior.
Time to get 'em archived.
Cheers,
Chuck
________________________________
-----REPLY-----
Agree. I have made disk images of about 400 NorthStar Horizon disks.
I am seeing some percentage of disks which just are not readable any longer.
Fortunately, not too many but it seems like INSUA and other original disks
are the worst.
What I am doing and encourage others to as well is to make disk images of
all of your NorthStar Horizon disks.
Write a one line summary of the contents of the disk into an index and send
the images to Bitsavers.org.
There is a NorthStar Horizon disk image archive at:
http://bitsavers.org/bits/NorthStar/NorthStar_Horizon/
You can send the disk images and indexes to me and I will load them for you.
Don't let your NorthStar Horizon information fade away. Once it is gone, it
is gone for good.
Thanks!
Andrew Lynch