On 12/22/2011 7:50 PM, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
On Friday, 23 December 2011 at 03:46:14 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
On 12/22/2011 7:30 PM, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
RAR (and some others) supports "recovery records" and "recovery volumes"
(redundant data). The cool thing about them is that with a recovery record of
10%, ANY 10% of the archive's blocks may be lost and the entire archive can be
recovered. It was a life-saver back in the days of floppies.
I also worried about not having the right uncompressor when I needed it.
Easily mitigated by putting decompression software on the same media, or by
creating self-extracting archives. Then you only need to worry about having the
right platform/architecture :)
Not that easy, because will you really have the right platform 30 years from
now?
One of the reasons I switched from Outlook Express to Thunderbird for email was
the latter stored the messages in plaintext, while the former in some secret
encrypted/compressed format. What are the odds you'll be able to get OE to run
30 years from now?
I've burned about 100 DVDs back when hard drives were in the 10s and 100s of
GBs. Another useful trick was storing a full catalog (file listings) of all past
burned DVDs on each disc.
Fortunately, because of the growth in capacity, carrying forward my media gets
easier and easier.
In the beginning of the world, when we were all worried about the coming ice
age, I had punch card decks. They're all gone, I have no recollection of what I
did with them.
Then, I had paper tape. None of them survived.
Then, I had DECtapes. None of them survived. I had a DEC magtape, but the tape
drive was so out of spec that it was the only machine that could read them. That
drive was long gone, so I throw my magtape in the trash.
I had a couple paper code listings I used as desperation backups.
I did use a phone line and dumped my code to the screen, and captured the output
and wrote them to 8" floppies. These actually did survive until last year, when
a friend fired up his old PDP-11 which hadn't been run for years, and copied all
the floppies and emailed me the files. Whew! (I threw away the floppies after that.)
Then, the era of the 5.25 floppy began. I still have boxes full of them.
I copied the floppies to a CD. They all fit on one CD.
Then copied the CDs to DVDs.
Then the DVDs to hard disks.
Then the hard disks to Amazon S3, and that's where I'm at now. My oldest file I
still have is from 1977. The floppy data all sit in a tiny corner of my hard disk.
