On Fri, June 26, 2009 09:33, mark@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote: > Well the data might live forever, but the computer necessary to read that > data sure isn't likely to be available. My wife has her masters thesis on > disks. Anyone got a computer that can read an old 5 1/4 floppy?? Lots of > data still on tape lost because there was no way to read it anymore. Lots of commercial services. And the last time I hooked mine up, it worked fine (the interface is still in all PCs I've checked); problem was, the disk I wanted to read was bad (other random disks I tried read okay). > Now that also assumes the media that stores the data doesn't have a > problem either. Every put in a CD that was a couple of years old and it > not be readable anymore??? No, actually. I've got CDs going back to 1994 or some such (CD-Rs, rather; burnable rather than pressed), and haven't yet had one go bad after burning. (I've had burn failures, but none going bad after passing verification, so far.) Blank quality and burner quality and storage conditions are all important, and I've been reasonably careful with the archival stuff. -- David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b@xxxxxxxx; http://dd-b.net/ Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/ Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/ Dragaera: http://dragaera.info
