5 Feb
2007
5 Feb
'07
8:13 a.m.
> "Personal papers" aren't on paper
any more, if they exist
> at all they are directories full of email.
Why is this a "huge issue"? My father made
xerox copies of his
important papers; I make regular backups. What's changed?
The volatility of the preservation medium, future ability to recover
a document in obscure formats, and the sheer volume of digital content
vs saved paper.
Is everything you're 'backing up' checksummed? How do you KNOW
it hasn't already been corrupted?
5 Feb
5 Feb
8:46 a.m.
Add to the fact that paper seems to be far more resilient then say CD
backups (which I've seen several CD's that I created around 97-98 which
are now having problems reading certain sections) and Tape backups of
today I wonder if they are truly as high grade as say the old TU78s of
the past (I've had my share of readying nearly 1,500 tapes that had been
stored in outside storage units for over 10 years - no protection from
heat/cold, frost/humidity) Most of them - astoundingly - were still
actually readable, however some - even with baking - separated from
their transport, others did a major number on the tape heads with globs
of sludge as they read, but still over all, the tapes even well past
their prime and kept in unbearable conditions, still favored well. I
would wonder if todays consumerized backup media would fare as well.
While bulky - I have been printing out nearly 9 years worth of email
correspondence relating to all of the Atari historical research I've
been doing and sorting it out to keep on record, I nearly lost it all
due to a sudden HD failure, but fortunately had a backup image on
another disk, I don't trust digital based storage for archival purposes.
Curt
Al Kossow wrote:
>
"Personal papers" aren't on paper any more, if they exist
> at all they are directories full of email.
Why is this a "huge issue"? My father
made xerox copies of his
important papers; I make regular backups. What's changed?
The volatility of the preservation medium, future ability to recover
a document in obscure formats, and the sheer volume of digital content
vs saved paper.
Is everything you're 'backing up' checksummed? How do you KNOW
it hasn't already been corrupted?
9:16 a.m.
In article <45C75F6D.2080605 at atarimuseum.com>,
"Curt @ Atari Museum" <curt at atarimuseum.com> writes:
While bulky - I have been printing out nearly 9 years
worth of email
correspondence relating to all of the Atari historical research I've
been doing and sorting it out to keep on record, I nearly lost it all
due to a sudden HD failure, but fortunately had a backup image on
another disk, I don't trust digital based storage for archival purposes.
I find that laser printer output tends to stick together after only a
few years. Maybe dot matrix would be better? Then there's the issue
of density -- most text documents use lots of paper compared to the
amount of information on the page. I have been considering the idea
of using the page as a large bitmap and simply printing the data onto
the bitmap along with checksum/parity information for each row and
so-on. This would reduce the bulk but keep the desirable aspects of
paper output as an archival medium...
Yet it seems like we have this discussion every few months or so and
most of us pick the backup medium that suits our tastes even if other
people are swearing up and down that it will never be reliable.
--
"The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download
<http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html>
Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>
12:32 p.m.
Curt @ Atari Museum wrote:
backups (which I've seen several CD's that I
created around 97-98 which
are now having problems reading certain sections) and Tape backups of
today I wonder if they are truly as high grade as say the old TU78s of
That's why you routinely transfer from old medium to new medium every
5-10 years.
Just last night I dumped 7 CDROMs to .ISO images and stored all of them
onto a single DVD-ROM; then made a 2nd copy and stored that somewhere
else. In five to ten years, I'll transfer the DVD-ROM onto some new medium.
--
Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/
Help our electronic games project: http://www.mobygames.com/
Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/
A child borne of the home computer wars: http://trixter.wordpress.com/
12:56 p.m.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jim Leonard" <trixter at oldskool.org>
To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts"
<cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Monday, February 05, 2007 3:32 PM
Subject: Re: Preservation of correspondence
Curt @ Atari Museum wrote:
medium.
backups (which I've seen several CD's
that I created around 97-98 which
are now having problems reading certain sections) and Tape backups of
today I wonder if they are truly as high grade as say the old TU78s of
That's why you routinely transfer from old medium to new medium every
5-10 years.
Just last night I dumped 7 CDROMs to .ISO images and stored all of them
onto a single DVD-ROM; then made a 2nd copy and stored that somewhere
else. In five to ten years, I'll transfer the DVD-ROM onto some new --
I do the same thing but also keep the original media. I dumped a few hundred
Colorado 120MB tapes to a bunch of cdroms years ago, and will dump those
cdrom to dvdr soon. The data on the CDs is in directories referencing the
tape number so I can go back and dump the tape again if the cd gets lost or
damaged. The problem with putting floppy images on a DVD is that if you lose
or destroy that DVD you lose a ton of data (and the time involved archiving
it).
6 Feb
6 Feb
3:22 a.m.
On Mon, Feb 05, 2007 at 11:46:37AM -0500, Curt @ Atari Museum wrote:
Al Kossow wrote:
>Is everything you're 'backing up' checksummed? How do you KNOW
>it hasn't already been corrupted?
If you can't rely on their integrity then they're not backups, they're
hopes. I am supremely confident in my backups' integrity, and I test
them regularly to make sure of it.
Add to the fact that paper seems to be far more
resilient then say CD
backups (which I've seen several CD's that I created around 97-98 which
are now having problems reading certain sections)
That's why I keep all my data on hard disk where practical - even the
CDs and DVDs I buy get transferred to hard disk - so that they'll get
transferred to some brand new shiny medium every few years. This also
means that the data are protected against the medium being scratched and
against my computer twenty years in the future not having a CDROM drive.
While bulky - I have been printing out nearly 9 years
worth of email
correspondence relating to all of the Atari historical research I've
been doing and sorting it out to keep on record
So it'll all go *poof* in a fire.
I don't trust digital based storage for archival
purposes.
Merely sticking your data onto a spinning magnetic disk obviously ain't
good enough. However, that plus rigourously sticking to good procedures
*is* good enough.
A much worse problem for archivists is that so much data is protected by
passwords and encryption. No-one apart from me knows the password to
decrypt my offsite backups, and I've not written it down anywhere. So
if I die in a house fire, that data is GONE.
--
David Cantrell | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david
Wow, my first sigquoting! I feel so special now!
-- Dan Sugalski
5 Feb
5 Feb
9:20 a.m.
Al Kossow wrote:
Is everything you're 'backing up'
checksummed?
Yes. I regularly ( == when I remember!) backup my email
by throwing it all into a zip archive and then that gets
written (along with other stuff) to CD, along with an
MD5SUM file.
I need to compress so that it all fits onto one CD; I wouldn't
normally compress stuff that I'm archiving but since I spit it
all to CD each month or so I'm hoping I won't ever lose it
all (and some of it _is_ offsite). Not that anyone will ever
care about my emails and letters ...
How do
you KNOW
it hasn't already been corrupted?
I don't. But I _will_ when I come to read it. To be honest though
I've never yet had a corrupt file read back from a CD. Either the
CD was fine or only intact files could be read back (intact ==
the zip archive tested OK). The reason I always throw an MD5SUM
file onto the CD is so that I can test it immediately on a different
drive. I think almost all of my hadnful of early "dead" CDs were
stillborn rather than cases of infant mortality.
I don't know whether Blu-Ray (or HD-DVD, or whatever takes off next)
will be any more reliable than DVD (or CD) but at least I'll be able
to consolidate all of my existing data onto a handful of disks, so
having multiple copies of stuff in different places will be much
less painful. Although I remember thinking much the same about
CD-R ("650MB? Noone will ever need that much storage ...")
My main worry is that there will be NO successor to Blu-Ray/HD-DVD.
If the entertainment industry decides to go for streamed content,
then will the comuter industry be willing to fund the next generation
format? What will we all do then?
Antonio
9:36 a.m.
At 5:20 PM +0000 2/5/07, <arcarlini at iee.org> wrote:
My main worry is that there will be NO successor to
Blu-Ray/HD-DVD.
If the entertainment industry decides to go for streamed content,
then will the comuter industry be willing to fund the next generation
format? What will we all do then?
Well, as we seem to be moving back to the "Mainframe" idea of
computing as a utility, where you just have a dumb terminal, and all
your apps run on a server somewhere out on the net, your data just
might be out there as well. Just think, all your personal
information will be under the control of some corporation. I can't
get over the feeling this is the real reason behind this trend!
Or, you have cloned copies of your data on multiple drives, which is
the model I'm leaning towards.
Of course there are always tape backups, I backup my VMS server to
DLT tapes. The downside is the only way to do this affordably is to
buy used equipment.
Zane
--
| Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| healyzh at aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast |
| MONK::HEALYZH (DECnet) | Classic Computer Collector |
+----------------------------------+----------------------------+
| Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, |
| PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum. |
| http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |
9:45 a.m.
In article <p06240800c1ed1a003e5f(a)[192.168.1.199]>9]>,
"Zane H. Healy" <healyzh at aracnet.com> writes:
[...] Just think, all your personal
information will be under the control of some corporation.
Yeah, much better to have a socialist data net where all my personal
information will be under the control of the government.
--
"The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download
<http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html>
Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>
12:29 p.m.
Al Kossow wrote:
Is everything you're 'backing up'
checksummed? How do you KNOW
it hasn't already been corrupted?
Yes, and with 5% parity, so I should be able to recover up to 5% loss.
I'm an archivist too, you know :-)
--
Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/
Help our electronic games project: http://www.mobygames.com/
Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/
A child borne of the home computer wars: http://trixter.wordpress.com/
6528
days inactive
6529
days old
9 comments
8 participants
participants (8)
-
aek＠bitsavers.org -
arcarlini＠iee.org -
curt＠atarimuseum.com -
david＠cantrell.org.uk -
healyzh＠aracnet.com -
legalize＠xmission.com -
teoz＠neo.rr.com -
trixter＠oldskool.org