Re: PC or Mac?

[mjmahon@aol.com (Michael J. Mahon)]

Paul Schlyter wrote:

<snip>
>To preserve data for the future, one must of course move it to newer
>media regularly. About two years ago I transferred all my old Apple
>II floppies to the PC and archived them on PC floppies.  And about
>one year ago, I copied all my old PC floppies to CD-ROM's --
>including those Apple II disk images.  The nice thing here (so far)
>is that new media holds so much more data: I could store 10 Apple II
>disk images on one PC floppy (more if I compressed them first).  And
>I can store 400+ PC floppies on one CD-ROM -- and some 12 CD-ROM's on
>a DVD..... that means some 50,000 uncompressed Apple II disk images
>on one single DVD!!!!  (I don't have that many Apple II disk images,
>but you get the idea...)

I do something equivalent every time I upgrade to a new computer--
about every 3-4 years.  I copy my entire hard disk from the old machine
over to a subdirectory of the new machine by plugging it into the new
machine as a slave drive.

The new drive is always about 10x or more larger than the old drive,
so the old drive info takes up a small fraction of the new drive's space.

Given the exponential increase in hard disk capacities, this strategy
has worked beautifully through four upgrades, or about 15 years.
And it means that my entire history is preserved as recursive
subdirectories on my current hard drive!

I do delete a few things to tidy up, like the windows directory and
many of my apps--since I reinstall the ones I continue to use, I can
easily delete them from my "recursive archive" as redundant.

"Moore's Law means never having to delete anything."

-michael

 Email:  mjmahon@aol.com
 Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/