On 16 Oct 2005 00:17:09 GMT, (Huge) wrote:

So, here's an 8" floppy, get the data off it for me, will you?

Or a TK50.

Or a DC6150.

I can read any of those formats with a couple of phone calls (also
cards, paper tapes, anything 9 track)

Anything later, and especially DAT from the early '90s, and you're
screwed.

In the mid '90s I worked on a (substantial budget, 6,000 disk) project
to store engineering drawings on optical disks. It was a re-work of a 5
year old project because the "eternity guarantee" optical media would
only be read by an optical reader that was no longer in production and
was becoming hard to find working readers for. In a staggering piece
of stupidity the barrow-boy mentality salesman who was architecting this
project chose to switch to a HP optical disk format that was available
cheaply because _those_ readers were becoming obsolete too. Of course in
under 5 years time, that project had to be entirely scrapped again.

Data evaporates from any medium that isn't actively spinning right this
minute. If you want to keep it, you need to put it onto a NAS now and
keep it on-line. As technology moves onwards, buy new hardware and copy
it over about every 5 years. Fortunately Moore's Law means that anything
it costs serious money to collect in the first place will be cheap to
move for the first time and trivial after that.

If you keep your data on a disk in a dark cupboard, it just won't be
there when you go to use it.