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Re: Escaping Data Rot
Tristan wrote:
On Mon, 22 Mar 2010 00:57:33 -0700, Michael J. Mahon wrote:
How about searching for *.dsk? (I assume they are still on your hard
disk...)
-michael
If only it were that easy.
They could be on:
*One of a couple of EOL hard drives.
*A partial backup of at least 4 hard drives.
*An SD card (multiple choices).
*A backup of an SD card.
*A backup of a hard drive with a backup of the SD card on it.
*Oblivion.
I have recently undertook the task of searching for ~15 years of my
projects and such. it is daunting to say the least. Things tucked away on
rotten floppies found wedged in things, damaged or EOL CDs, worn out hard
drives etc.
A warning to those archiving things. Remember when CDs were relatively
new and they said they have approx. 10 year life span? They weren't lying.
Your early CD-Rs are quietly rotting.
Beginning around 1996, I found that each new system I bought had a
hard drive about 10x the size of my previous hard drive, so I began
to copy the entire hard drive from the old system into a folder on
the new drive I called "Old-C".
The result is that I have every thing I ever downloaded, every email
I ever sent or received, every photo I ever took, etc., neatly archived
in a "stringy tree" of "Old-C" subdirectories.
Since systems have gotten faster as disks have gotten bigger, I can
search this entire archive quite easily.
There is no longer any reason to delete files (unless they are humongous
video files that you are *sure* you will never want again). The cost of
the space recovered is far less than the cost (in effort) to find and
delete them (without mistakenly deleting something you actually wanted).
Obviously, this approach works best with a fairly organized approach
to files and directories, but that goes without saying.
A corollary is that the best backup medium for a hard disk is another
hard disk. It is much cheaper and infinitely more convenient to do a
disk-to-disk copy than to play with changing removeable optical disks.
-michael
NadaNet and AppleCrate II: parallel computing for Apple II computers!
Home page: http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon
"The wastebasket is our most important design
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