David Dyer-Bennet : All my computers still have 3.5" floppies. I've got a couple of 5.25" : drives around, and have transferred data with them in the last few : years. But that's all beside the point -- which is that my actual data : on floppies was transferred years ago. (Good thing, since floppies : don't last very well.) amen. I don't have the 3.5 any more but I still have a stack of LS120 drives and a few zips in the off chance someone needs some data recovered.. : Digital media aren't wonderful for "benign neglect", but they're : wonderful for an actively managed archive. The ability to make a : perfect copy is magical for archiving; you can protect things against : levels of disaster no other approach really has a chance of surviving. this is so true. Active, constant management will keep things as safe as you can get, but it is a very active process. One department I worked for recently was culling its paper archived and disposing of material and info that had been stored for up to 100 years. It seemed sad watching all that stuff bound for destruction. It also contrasted sharply with digital material that hadn't lasted a month before it was lost. The active management needs to have strict guidelines, and seems to work best when the fewest people possible are involved :) : Well, I wish him luck, but in my experience the optical media are a lot : more stable than magnetic media. I've yet to have an optical disk that : passed initial verification fail later, whereas disks fail in use every : year or so. OMG, really? these aren't IBM Travelstars you're speaking of.. ?? I just threw out a ten year old IBM that I decided was really not worth keeping anymore - 1Gb with so many disk errors it was a joke. All data recovered though - then I discovered I'd already archived that drive years ago.. I've started tossing out all the drives smaller than 80Gb too but that's from them being to small. I had one drive fry its board a few years back but a quick trip to ebay to buy the same drive, strip the board, swap and recover the data and all was fine again. Aside from that all's been good with the stacks of drives lying about here. Though I must pick some up off the floor, Anita keeps kicking them accidentally .. k
