Re: PC or Mac?

[pausch@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter)]

In article <20020204021621.28175.00001923@mb-ba.aol.com>,
Michael J. Mahon <mjmahon@aol.com> wrote:
 
> 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.
 
I don't do it like that -- usually there's a large overlap between
when I get a new machine and when I discard (or put away) the old
one.  Meanwhile I connect them with either a serial or a parallell
("Laplink") caple, and transfer the files to the newer machine that
way.  The old machines were backed up to CD-ROM's a few years ago.
 
Howrever, when I added a second 40 GB HD to my latest machine which
previously had an 8 GB HD, then I backed up the old HD on the new
one.  Then I repartitioned and reformatted the old HD: half of it
for WIndows, the other half for Linux.
 
> 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."
 
:-)
 
-- 
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Paul Schlyter,  Swedish Amateur Astronomer's Society (SAAF)
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