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The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

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Well, at least we have paper... | 170 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Well, at least we have paper...
Authored by: betajet on Friday, December 07 2012 @ 10:38 AM EST
... and OCR scanning keeps getting better. I need to resurrect and re-edit some
old documents that were on a Macintosh (now deceased, so cannot access hard
drive) with backups on 800K DS/DD Mac format floppies. I don't think anybody
makes hardware that can access the latter, and fat chance of being able to read
the data after 20 years anyway.

But I do have high-quality hard copy and a copy shop nearby that can scan them
for me. So once again good old papyrus remains the archival medium of choice.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Death of CD's
Authored by: Wol on Friday, December 07 2012 @ 06:34 PM EST
That bit us rather badly at work some years ago. We had a bunch of 9-track tapes
(that dates it a bit!).

When we retired the system, we didn't think to copy the data tapes. Oops.

Even worse, we were "forced" to migrate databases, and while the new
one (UniVerse) was a clone of the old one (INFORMATION) - so much so that the
programs mostly ran after just a simple recompile - the actual file format was
rather different.

And then our researcher came to me and said "how far back can you go with
historic data?". Help!

Cheers,
Wol

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Use USB HDs for now, forget CDs and DVDs.
Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, December 08 2012 @ 01:21 PM EST

Migrate to newer technologies as they show up. I migrate my HD stored stuff every few years to keep the magnetic domains good.. When I store it I make checksum files and verify the contents when it comes time to migrate. Depending on importance I make two or three copies, obviously on different hard disks. One set is always stored off site.

When I migrate from drive to drive, I do a copy of everything, then I use the original checksum file to verify the contents transfered OK. Any file that didn't, has happened a few times already, gets checked on the original copied again if OK or I go to the backup. Also there are programs like parchive that will generate a set of redundancy files for a group of files. They allow correction of some bad blocks of data before needing to go to the second backup HD set. I now use them for important stuff, but likely should set their use by default in my backup scripts. With a quad core processor I have compute cycles to spare when generating my backup HDs. I have the scripts that do all the work run in the background as I do other stuff like writing up this post.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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