So recently, I've been going through my disk collection. It had been stored in a unheated storage unit in a small town in Canada for more than 20 years, and before that was left pretty much to fend for itself through various moves. To my utter surprise, the vast majority of the disks were readable. However...
I had accumulated quite a variety of disks over the years. 3M, Verbatim, Dysan, Wabash, No-name... I think I pretty much have at least one example of all disks available
I had 5.25", 8", 3" (yes, really), 3.5"... and that was the first hurdle, getting set to read these disks. Thankfully, great folks like Keir Fraser have released tools (both hardware and software) that make this task a lot easier.
But then the second set of problems arose. Some were 35 track, single sided. Some 40. Some 80. Some 76. Some double sided. Some mixed density. Some hard sector, most soft sector. And the reading of the data was just the first set of problems - figuring out how to copy the files to current media was... challenging. Archiving the disk image itself was pretty easy, but extracting files was harder.
In total, I'm processing about 10 file-boxes full of media - thousands of disks. Some gems are emerging (like the recent beta copy of Microsoft Level III), but most of it has historic interest only to me - things like BIOS code I wrote back in the day, microcode for various things, schematics, application programs...
This is really a sub-plot of larger issues of data accessibility, however. I have literally terabytes of data which I've accumulated over my life. There are pictures, video, audio, scans, databases (I have one of the largest spam collections in the world, going back 25+ years), along with code. It's pretty easy to be a data hoarder, I guess.
But how best to organize this? And how best to know that the data is "still good"? Even though some of the floppies had valid CRCs, the data was in fact corrupt. Did it get corrupted in storage, or was it written corrupted due to a system or memory failure back in the day? No way to really know for sure.
This kind of forum allows me to ask the question to a larger audience - how do you preserve data for the future? How do you make sure it is still accessible and "the same" as when it was created. What systems do you use? What can I do better?
I had accumulated quite a variety of disks over the years. 3M, Verbatim, Dysan, Wabash, No-name... I think I pretty much have at least one example of all disks available
I had 5.25", 8", 3" (yes, really), 3.5"... and that was the first hurdle, getting set to read these disks. Thankfully, great folks like Keir Fraser have released tools (both hardware and software) that make this task a lot easier.
But then the second set of problems arose. Some were 35 track, single sided. Some 40. Some 80. Some 76. Some double sided. Some mixed density. Some hard sector, most soft sector. And the reading of the data was just the first set of problems - figuring out how to copy the files to current media was... challenging. Archiving the disk image itself was pretty easy, but extracting files was harder.
In total, I'm processing about 10 file-boxes full of media - thousands of disks. Some gems are emerging (like the recent beta copy of Microsoft Level III), but most of it has historic interest only to me - things like BIOS code I wrote back in the day, microcode for various things, schematics, application programs...
This is really a sub-plot of larger issues of data accessibility, however. I have literally terabytes of data which I've accumulated over my life. There are pictures, video, audio, scans, databases (I have one of the largest spam collections in the world, going back 25+ years), along with code. It's pretty easy to be a data hoarder, I guess.
But how best to organize this? And how best to know that the data is "still good"? Even though some of the floppies had valid CRCs, the data was in fact corrupt. Did it get corrupted in storage, or was it written corrupted due to a system or memory failure back in the day? No way to really know for sure.
This kind of forum allows me to ask the question to a larger audience - how do you preserve data for the future? How do you make sure it is still accessible and "the same" as when it was created. What systems do you use? What can I do better?