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Archive.org Deploys Macromedia Software Titles

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the rip-mix-burn dept.

Jon-Erik Hexum writes "Now at the internet archive, the new software section contains over 10,000 CD-ROM titles donated by Macromedia. In an interesting discussion, the Software Archive is struggling with deciding on the best method for preserving CD-ROM images for the long term."

2 of 148 comments (clear)

  1. Preserving CD-ROMs by Wee · · Score: 5, Insightful
    I was looking for ROM to old games (MOO, MOO2, Starflight) a while back, and recalled that I had a box of floppies that also had some old games on them. Hardly any of the 3 1/2 floppies were any good and I couldn't even read the 5 1/4 inch ones I found. That got me curious about what will happen to my meticulously ordered and cataloged CD-R/ROM collection.

    While I was indulging my data storage daydreams, I came across a discussion board thread which talks about the various issues surround storing digital media (pictures, in this case). It was pretty intersting reading. I hadn't thought about gold-plated CDs before, and that sounds like a great idea as long as the hardware to read them exists for the duration of the media's shelf life. Even NASA has been having trouble in that area.

    At first blush, I'd say the way to save all the images would be some sort of distrubuted filesystem, a la Freenet. Package an ASCII metafile with the ROMs file format info along with the actual image file and that should do it. Some sort of centralized system of making sure that at least N copies exist in "the wild" and the data could be reasonably safe. I'm oversimplifying, of course, but it occurred to me that data integrity and file formats might not be the only barriers to long-term data storage. Governments aren't especially data-friendly 100% of the time, either. If you really want to save data for all posterity, you have to protect it from yourself as well.

    -B

    --

    Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.

  2. Preserving CD-ROM Images! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    deciding on the best method for preserving CD-ROM images for the long term

    Keep them in the standard .iso format. It's only physical media that will change, but with virtual drives, the iso format won't be unreadable!