"IMHO, it makes little sense to retain media for washing-machine-sized disk drives if you don't retain the drives and maintain them in order to retain the value of the media. Hindsight is always 20/20, but wouldn't it make sense to archive data/software on an archival medium, likely, we hope, to remain useable over time, rather than to store it on what's intended for on-line storage, and is likely to become obsolete within a couple of years of when it was developed? " It makes perfect sense, and as soon as I can get a mechanism running to read the packs, the data will be archived. If it was simple to get this done, I would have finished the project years ago. Archiving data in a form that is "useable over time" is another matter entirely, and I'm sure it must have been the subject of many messages here in the past.