On Tue, 13 May 2003, Hills, Paul wrote:
> Although the storage medium transferred to may have a shorter life, the
> information itself may have a longer life. As the previous poster said, he
> can store all his old 8-bit stuff in a tiny corner of his hard disk. That
> can get stored to CD. Now write-able DVD has arrived, it can be copied to an
> even smaller corner of a DVD. When the next, even more dense, medium
> arrives, it may be copied to an increasingly smaller corner of that. As long
> as this copying process occurs more often than the life-length of each
> medium, there's no problem. Keeping a copy of each intervening storage media
> gives you your backups too.
Great theory, but humans have a proven track record of being notoriously
bad at keeping up with their backups.
> There is a danger of leaving the information on the original only, as
> exemplified by the problems with the BBC's (UK) doomsday project
> (http://www.si.umich.edu/CAMILEON/domesday/press.html), which fortunately
> were solved. Even though it may be theoretically possible to resurrect the
> data, it might be very difficult.
That's a bad example. Those folks never thought to look for a thriving
vintage computer community that would be able to provide them with the
parts they needed.
--
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
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Received on Sat May 17 2003 - 09:26:00 BST