Andy Dingley wrote:
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.
snip
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.

It depends.
For example, about 10 years ago, I moved all my floppy collection onto
CD, about 3 of them. (2 copies)
I'm at the moment archiving some old CDs onto DVD at the moment, the
floppy disks went onto one DVD.

On line is not needed - as long as readers remain available, and you run
thourough data integrity tests every so often.