TWCL

[nothinghappenedtoday]

"Comics on Titanium" has a nice ring to it...

[Zoe Robinson]

nothinghappenedtoday wrote:

"Comics on Titanium" has a nice ring to it...

For when you absolutely, positively have to re-enter the Earth's orbit while keeping to your deadline, accept no substitutes.
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[fluffy]

I am a big, big fan of CrashPlan. With them it's easy to back up all your computers onto other computers (using whatever storage you have around the house, or sharing disk space with your friends over the network), and for $5/month they give you access to their offsite servers for unlimited home computers (or $3/month if you only want to back up one). The backup options are also really flexible.

Basically it's like Time Machine on a Mac, except it also supports Windows and Linux and lets you back up to lots of locations simultaneously.

Of course, since all the computers I back up are Macs I only use CrashPlan for their servers, since I also have Time Machine backups of everything locally. But you can never be too safe with this stuff.
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i am a busy bee

[Miluette]

I still have terribly drawn MS Paint mouse-art from 2000 on disks and (for some reason) copied onto my external hard drive.

Yeah... I've never lost anything except for a gift art file that corrupted when Painter ran out of memory while saving. *lucky* And as much as I've abused my PCs, they've never been anywhere near not-functioning, bad as they are for getting what I want to do done. But, if they ever did crash, I'd pretty much be covered. (Except my external HD ran out of space now. I am sad. Need to burn off extra things again...)
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[nothinghappenedtoday]

This thread is reminding me of another problem, what to do when your back-up becomes out of date. Remember Syquest discs? They were huge, cost a fortune, and held maybe 80 MEGABYTES! All you kids out there, don't laugh -- it was the mid 1990's. Anyhoo-- I still have lots of my design and illustration work from college and my early design career, but good luck finding anyone who still has a Syquest drive.
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nothinghappenedtoday.com

[Zoe Robinson]

To be honest, I've never had a problem keeping up to date with technology when making backups. I've been around since cassette tapes were the pinnacle of technology and each time I've updated my storage, I've just moved my files onto the new stuff.

There are some 3" disks in my office, for example, but the files that are on them were ported to my PC from the old Amstrad CPC and then stuck onto 3.5" floppies. When CD and DVD came around, anything that was still needed was dumped onto those. As long as you're conscientious, you can easily keep up with the times.

My wife on the other hand prefers the alternative method: she still has a 5.25" disk drive in the top-of-the-range PC she built. That way she doesn't have to move with the times if she doesn't want to.
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[nothinghappenedtoday]

5.25"?!?!?! Get off the Trolley!
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nothinghappenedtoday.com

[henspacecwb]

Zoe Robinson wrote:

I've been around since cassette tapes were the pinnacle of technology ...

Far too high-tech. You should be backing up on punched cards.
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[Zoe Robinson]

henspacecwb wrote:

Far too high-tech. You should be backing up on punched cards.

I'm not that old! Hence the qualifier re cassettes.
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[Varethane]

I am not all that old, I suppose... my first backups were on floppy disks (all of which are now corrupt, not that I even have a computer with a drive that could take them anymore), and a couple on... zip disks? Whatever they were called, that looked like thicker versions of floppies.

I think I might still have them around! But I dunno how I'll ever get any files off them... (or if I really want to, as well. I was about 12 or 13 at the time?)
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[fluffy]

A few years ago, I ended up with an old Powermac G4 with built-in zip drive, so I dug my old zip disks out of storage and decided to see what was so important that I kept on them Many of them were corrupt, most just contained random crap I didn't care about anymore, but one of them, labeled "large .wav files," was still intact. The largest one was a whopping 600KB.
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i am a busy bee

[henspacecwb]

Zoe Robinson wrote:

I'm not that old!

Lucky you.
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[Miluette]

Yeah, a lot of my old crappy mouse art was on floppies, and a couple years ago I recovered everything I could off those floppies -- including terrible old fanfiction from fanfiction.net and random MIDI files -- formatted them, and got rid of them. A bunch of the floppies corrupted, mostly ones with MIDIs/sfx on them. I'm hoping my CDs and DVDs don't, and so far they seem to be holding up fine.

I'm completely paranoid about something happening to my external HD ever since one of my friend's went up in smoke for some reason, but that's also why I've been burning stuff.
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[fluffy]

CD-Rs can be expected to last on the order of 20-30 years. Much better than floppies, but still not forever.
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i am a busy bee

[nothinghappenedtoday]

I remember hearing a story a few years back on "This American Life" on NPR. It was about the Library of Congress's Sound Archives. Basically, they are in charge of keeping audio recordings of famous speeches, songs, events, etc. And what do they use? Metal records. The logic is that no matter what happens to technology, all you need to hear it is a sharp pin. Music formats change, and CDs and DVDs will no longer be of use if there are no programs left that can decipher the files in 100 years (even if the data is fine. Remember, we're talking about 1's and 0's here, not actual sounds.) They played Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" -- it was interesting hearing it on a steel record, it had an old-timey, tinny sound. I thought it was cool how the most basic technology was the most reliable. Hell, look at Ancient Egyptian stone carvings or clay tablets -- they're still here.
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