Friday, 7 June 2013

Preserving digital data

From Computerworld: Cerf sees a problem: Today's digital data could be gone tomorrow.

"What I'm saying is that backward compatibility is very hard to preserve over very long periods of time." [said Cerf, who is Google's vice president and chief Internet evangelist].

The data objects are only meaningful if the application software is available to interpret them, Cerf said. "We won't lose the disk, but we may lose the ability to understand the disk."
I have more than a few A-drive disks in my desk drawer that illustrate this point. Not that there's anything important on them... at least, I don't think. But I don't know, now do I?

A quick search on ebay.ca reveals all hope is not lost - there are old floppy drives for sale, though I imagine they will become more and more rare as time goes on.



Bonus! Got old floppies lying around? Make them into pen holders, planters, or coasters. And probably a bunch of other things, too. Never underestimate the imagination of internet crafty types.




Also: 


I'm done now, I promise.











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