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What's the Oldest File You Can Restore?
turtleshadow writes "Now that it's almost 2011, a question for anyone who's kept backups since before the Y2K non-event: Have you personally/professionally had to recover something from 10+ years ago? If so, please share the interesting 'hows,' especially if you had to do multiple media transfers and file formats to get data into a usable file format on a modern hardware platform of your choice. Native solutions are rated higher than emulation. Also, what are your plans for recovering in 2021? Street cred goes to the oldest, most technical and complex restores ... that are of course successful. I'm working the night shift Christmas/New Year's; I ask everybody still stirring and hardcore SysOPs."
but /me /join #whogivesashit
why do I bother coming to this site anymore :(
I used this 15+ years ago
_______
@echo off
mouse.com
win.com
Over time they've been migrated with the rest of my data through various 8, 16, and 32 bit PCs, and currently reside on my x86-64 Fedora box. The original hardware is LONG dead. I could probably get them natively off anything going back to my Model 4P, but that would be annoying and require using an RS-232 cable.
I "recovered" a 5.25" floppy disk from the early 80s a couple weeks ago.
And here I was thinking that most operations-people would rather cred the LEAST complex solution to the problem.
Just restored a 1998 backup from a DLT4000 cartridge, using tar. Oooh. Nothing fancy. ...
...a restore the other day of an entire dos database program. Had to restore from tape to hdd, usb hdd adapter to flash and then to customers to put on a winxp machine running the program in a dos box.
They plan on sticking with the dos version :-/
I have some old files on discs I wrote on a MacIntosh using MacWrite 1.0
I was able to read them with Word, but lost the font info. I also had some stuff in MacDraw and MacPaint, but that was hard to read. MacWrite stored the font info based on the installed fonts on the Mac. E.g. it would reference the 3rd installed font. Obviously, this was a problem if you added fonts. I hear that this was fixed in MacWrite 2.0, but never confirmed!
ASCII forever!!
I have disk copies and files from my IBM PC in the 1985 time frame. That's the oldest data I personally owned/created that I have records for; prior to that it was TRS-80 BASIC on cassette tapes and extremely hard to retrieve/use. I've got it in my permanent data archive, which is sometimes fun to browse around and see what I was doing 20+ years ago.
Alter Aeon Multiclass MUD - http://www.alteraeon.com
More than ten years? I have had to do recovery from code stored on paper tape and Hollerith cards. I am sure that recovery of stuff 40+ years old is not all that uncommon actually.
probably not the oldest format to be recovered but if you can get 15y/o with out data loss thats a win in my book
I'd be interested in knowing what the record is for most overwritten restore.
I have reformatted by accident, reinstalled and then thought how can I get that one file I wanted from it? Obviously it's impossible now but I thought it was possible.
Fact: If you encrypt your file system and you lose the key, it doesn't matter if you give the file system to the NSA, nobody will ever decrypt it.
On the other hand if you just delete and overwrite it, who knows it might take a lot of effort but how much effort does it take to restore something casually over written?
Also what is more secure as a destruction process, encrypt and forget or zero the drive?
I'd be interested in knowing what the record is for most overwritten restore.
I have reformatted by accident, reinstalled and then thought how can I get that one file I wanted from it? Obviously it's impossible now but I thought it was possible.
Fact: If you encrypt your file system and you lose the key, it doesn't matter if you give the file system to the NSA, nobody will ever decrypt it.
On the other hand if you just delete and overwrite it, who knows it might take a lot of effort but how much effort does it take to restore something casually over written?
Also what is more secure as a destruction process, encrypt and forget or zero the drive?
Fire.
...that is positively ancient.
FFS I think I have DVDs from that time. Even 20+ years is ridiculous. I have CDs burned in 1997-1998 that still work perfectly.
30+ years is a minimum. Back when the common storage medium was a cassette.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Mainly because while all other drive formats are cheap, those damn SCSI drives require specialized equipment which still seems to cost hundreds of dollars.
A customer came to my place of work, a local workbench, and asked if we could recover a file from a 5.25" Floppy. Luckily coworker managed to dig up a working 5.25" from our junk bin, and put the floppy in.. and it worked. The last modified date on the file was from 1991, and it was a CAD design for some Microwave device the company used to make back in the day.
I connected the printer out to a linux parallel in, wrote a Linux reader and did a PR#6 on the apple. I've heard of people using the audio out in a similar manner. I'm amazed that the Apple II+ disks seem to be in readable condition.
I have some tape cassettes made by a Commadore Pet 2000 made in 1979. Even if I were to restore them, I don't know how to transfer them.
Actually, services that recover physically damaged hard disk drives (including water and fire damage) are a dime a dozen. Physically smashing the drive would be slightly more effective than fire but twiddling ALL the bits to hell and back is the best way.
I have some of my father's programs from 1972 made on paper tape. Does anyone want to know what's on them!!
When I was in graduate school one of my tasks was to read old astronomical CCD images that were written on magnetic tape (and there were a lot of them, since my advisor had been testing CCDs for the Hubble). So for a couple of months I sat in a small workroom with the department's only working Kennedy drive reading tapes.
Because of age and prior use, many of the tapes were shedding oxide, making the drive rock back and forth over many segments in an attempt to retrieve the blocks thereon. After every few tapes I had to wipe the oxide from the read heads. Then, just to make the process a little more tedious, the data itself had to be byte-swapped. As a reward for all of that, I found one image to use in my dissertation.
The data was written to CD-ROM in the late 90s, so I expect there's someone right now trying to figure out how to read the data off of the decade-old, decaying archive. If they're lucky, they'll find the backup DATs in the filing cabinet and the last working drive in the department.
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
The last time I needed my resume' was in the mid 1980's. Therefore, it was stored on a 5 1/4 floppy for my Commodore 64, in "Speedscript" format. After getting the Speedscript word processor loaded into the C64, I saved it as "ASCII" in a SEQ file. Then I booted "HDD64" on an old P200 PC, and connected the 1541 drive to it, thru an "X1541" cable. Once saved to the PC's HD, I booted Windows 98. Once done, I brought it across the LAN into my WIN2000 box, and then re-worked it in MS Word 2000. That is the format it remains in until WORD becomes obsolete! ;)
I had typed Speedscript in, byte-by-byte, from a COMPUTE! Magazine article, years before. For a 6K (yes, six kilobytes) program, it did an absolutely outstanding job! I used that program more than any other on my C64 for years.
Willie...
By that metric, everyday? My computer is 10 years old. PIII 866 on a 440BX. Win2K. So what?
Last year I got given a QIC-150 tape written in 1995 to see if I could recover someone's old email archives. First I had to locate a QIC drive but a bit of hunting on the local Freecycle group got me an external SCSI unit weighing about 40 pounds with a tape drive and a full-height 500MB hard drive included. The tape drive didn't work, in that it talked SCSI-II all right to the BSD box's controller and the motor went round and round but no data came out.
The first inkling of bad news was realising that someone else had been into the tape drive mechanism before me when I saw the chewed-up screws holding the covers on. The really bad news was seeing the capstan roller on the drive -- or rather the motor shaft where the capstan roller used to be. It had gone missing sometime in the past and the bodger who had been in before me figured that a bunch of rubber bands would make a suitable replacement for the roller. This was some time back, judging by the condition of the rubber bands which were now a sticky mess of perished semi-liquid rubber.
I rummaged in my junkbox and pulled out an old lump of solid rubber, a platen roller from a daisywheel printed I had junked decades ago. I measured up the motor shaft, made some educated guesses and machined a replacement roller on the workshop lathe. After degunking the motor shaft with a scalpel and needle files the new capstan roller was driven into place and after that the data came pouring off the tape like it had been written yesterday as good old-fashioned CSV-delimited tarball archives. The owner of the tape got back the first emails he ever exchanged with the lady who he had since married and there was much rejoicing.
Well, I do not know will it be counted but I just week ago restored a Win98SE system image from old backup to old P3 500Mhz computer just to get Microsoft Sidewinder Wheel work as meant with Need For Speed 5 Porche Unleashed game.
I had changed a 3D card from GF2 to GF4 card and I needed to search up drivers for it. Of course USB 2 memory stick did not work with the computer (Win98SE did not recognize it as it was 8Gb) and I needed to transfer driver with DVD-RW disk from other computer as win98 machine did not have internet (and will not have such).
It was fun to play a such great driving game with working wheel since that times. Even that the image was from 99 and from the need at that time to make a full system installation with all wanted apps and updates + drivers and then make a easy restore image as the Win98 (and SE) usually corrupted itself now and then so the restoration was then faster and easier than doing a re-install by typical way.
This story's challenge sounds like a contest held by the Dead Media Project that SF/futurist author Bruce Sterling started in a 1990s mailing list. Though it's really about "extinct media", but Sterling is an SF author.
I'm amused to see that today the DMP itself is down. I hope they've got a backup - and a restore device that works.
--
make install -not war
Also what is more secure as a destruction process, encrypt and forget or zero the drive?
Fire.
No, you have to nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
Files you can restore? How about what's the youngest file you need that you can't restore?
I am not a sig.
Well back around the mid 80s I had the brilliant idea to use all my old 10 or 20 mg hard drives to store data like floppys. I put some stuff on them that was fairly important like student loan and other stuff. I recently had to get that data about a year ago and it was really fun. I had to build a box with an MFM interface and load an old copy of DOS on it. Took like 25 tried before I had a complete set of DOS 3 floppys. Seemed like every time one of or all three of the set had some file gone. Then I had the fun of trying to find a copy of wordstar or thinking should I just use edlin to read it. Joy- never again (I hope).
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
The most effective way to destroy data, is to physically destroy the media it's stored on. Running the drive through a fine grinding machine or melting it down completely, are two very secure methods.
Willie...
Actually, this wasn't something I did myself, but the Apollo Guidance Computer source code must be one of the oldest 'backups' to be recovered. Old assembler printouts saved by the programmers were OCR-ed, then fixed up by hand where the OCR couldn't read the text, then assembled, then checksummed and cross-checked with the binary dump in the printout, then run on an emulator:
http://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/
When I bought Amiga Forever not too long ago, I broke out the old A1000 and imaged around 150 or so 3.5" diskettes dating back to between 1985-1989 using Cloanto's Amiga Explorer tool and the appropriate null modem cable. Of all the disks I had, there was only one that I was unable to read, and I'd had problems with that disk way back then too. I've also got a couple of Mac disks from 1984 that my Classic II appears to read just fine. When I get around to getting motivated enough to put a 5.25" drive in my machine, I've got a set of Windows/286 disks that I'd like to image as well. They've been maintained well so I'm pretty optimistic about it.
Got a catweasel MK4+ floppy controller, it advertises a pretty broad catalog of different floppy formats so I think I've got that side covered :)
Emulation takes care of the rest. Just image old medium and read them.
But really, the oldest stuff I ever run to is 3½ floppies these days. (Except c64/etc.. stuff)
Likely still the hardest for me is video, no matter what the year is it's still hard to get realtime video capture working at times. Simple stuff like VHS/cam to avi. Hardware is somewhat ok, software never wants to work like it should and computers rely on a dice in whenever to work properly.
I have seen expensive equipment with mac pro's, and scalers, even those have their share of problems.. Altough a lot less than cheaper solutions.
And to stay a bit on-topic, the oldest restore for me has been files from a old old drive (200mb I think). Floppies are something I deal with somewhat frequently as well, be it either reading old stuff or writing so it can be used on older systems.
Oh and I hate recovering stuff from old cd's, I hate optical medium so much. Those who have dealt with this probably knows what I mean.
I have files since the 1980's. Not the original media of course.
I'm sure I have some UV EEPROMs laying around somewhere
I used to play with my mom's punch tapes as a child, I hope she didn't need to restore those... ;-)
Psst., if you were bright and wikileaked it back then, you could just google for you data today!
It used to be possible for an expert with a magnetic probe to read overwritten data from a hard drive. I don't think it's possible today, due to vastly higher data density. Smaller bits, tighter tolerances.
The best way to recover files deleted that long ago from a hard drive is probably one of these three options:
1) Invent a time machine and travel back in time to when the file was on the hard drive (or at least deleted and not yet had the sectors written-over);
2) Go underground in the world of dark magicks to discover a sinister ritual involving virgin sacrifice to resurrect the long-dead files;
3) Use an Ouija board with simply "1" and "0" on it and reconstruct the file from the afterlife bit-by-bit.
These are the likeliest and easiest solutions to your problem. I wish you luck.
I do graphics and I find I have problems when I try to use some 10+ year old models. Not all older models will work in all software even if they support the format. The proprietary model formats have changed over the years and they get dicey after a while. I've even found that with standard image formats. Sometimes converting them to a different format can avoid issues but I've often found that what was causing the problem would migrate to the new format. With text files if you have problems try converting to a format that lacks formatting. It's generally the formatting symbols that are causing the problems.
I can still recover my files from my ZX Spextrum (and my sinclair +2). These files are from 83-93 (I switched to PC during 1993), some of the files from tape, other from disquettes
Among these files, all my programs on HP48SX (and my home made kermit transfert system for Spectrum) and some other.
Well, the fact that both my Spectrum 48K and my Sinclair +2 still work do help.
Normal OS commands don't enable you to overwrite a file; when you save a file, it might be written over the old one, or somewhere else on the disk (even though it still has the same filename), in which case the old version could still be recovered. Disk wipers, at least simple ones, just keep adding to a file until all free space is full to make sure they got everything.
But once that physical block is overwritten, the previous data is gone. Assertions to the contrary are nothing but urban legend and speculation. Nobody seems comfortable claiming that one pass with zeroes is sufficient, but I've seen no evidence that it isn't.
It does not seem I've ever lost something of value (well, something of value, I once lost a couple of pron movies that seemed interesting because I couldn't remember the disk encryption password where I saved them and needed the space so I re-formatted the partition), anyway, the oldest thing around here is a revision of more or less the first program I've ever written, which is a Turbo Pascal DOS program that lists how much free space there is on each partition and drive, which was fairly important in 1996 when hard drives were roughly the size of a sincle compact disc. Revision control back then would have been nice, so I could step through each of the changes I've made to make it work or make it better; I suppose I have a couple of backups of older versions on encrypted DVDs, but it would indeed by kinda cool if all of it was available and I could, say, make a video that'd replicate my efforts from back then, showing the many compile failures, utterly wrong results, and so on, until I got it right.
I've pulled data off of real floppies that were at least 20 years old. I keep an old ISA/pre ATX motherboard, power supply and drive for such work. It's worth noting that there is vast quantities of old DEC mini and mainframe software preserved on the web, much of it from long-gone formats such as Dectape, paper tape and 7-track magtape.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
I have a lot of music I wrote using Voyetras Sequencer 4 and a propitiatory file format along with an EISA-midi card in DOS. I still have a 486 to use the stuff.
The DOS application is very responsive though ;)
A crazy guy cut off the top of some TO-5 can style ROMs for the HP-35 calculator and extracted the bits by taking photos and doing some image processing.
Film at 11
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
PS. I was referring to modern media (hard drives, flash). Since this thread could reasonably include really sloppy, inefficient old media like audiocasettes with data encoded on them, I admit the possibility for recovering data from them is much greater.
Agreed, I have DVDs, from 10+ years, CDs from 15 years ago and floppies from 25 years ago that work fine. All that's in my archives are email and personal source code from when I was fiddling around trying to learn a few things, nothing too interesting. Don't even know why I keep it. Source code from when I was a kid is fun to look back at, I kept all of my iterations so I can track what I was learning, but nothing too useful and certainly not very relevant today.
Twinstiq, game news
10+ years? Seriously - you consider that old? My website is older than that. I've got outdated copies of my resume (my wife's as well) older than that. I've got saved email messages older than that.
#DeleteChrome
I still have onstream tapes from the mid 90s and a windows 98 PC in a VM and a parallel port Onstream drive for access to it.
I once photographed a bunch of cave paintings in France. To my surprise, when I tried to play them as a slideshow, they compiled and auto-ran an application offering to cure my erectile disfunction.
I have Apple II software, C64 software, and even TRS-80 Model I & III software, on disks from back then that I have to sometimes work to get the data off.
But not that often, seeing as most the software from those systems I also have downloaded from usenet for emulators for my collections.
I also have a pair of 360k 5.25" floppy drives in an old pentium system I use for some systems, like the TRS-80's for reading/writing the info into the PC world.
If i only had a 486 or earlier computer still, i'd be in heaven (though i do have some 486 plug in cards for a mac or 2 i have, but that don't count.
Be seeing you...
I find your comment about ancient somewhat troubling. The writings of Confucius or Aristotle are ancient. Of course, most of the stuff we keep on computers is not important but there are some things that we want to recover. Some stuff might be quite valuable. Yes, the pace of technology is very quick but that is irrelevant to the value of a file.
my-desktop:/home/me> cp /home/me/machines/mit/rts-23/hacks/attraction.lisp .
I keep everything on-line. The amount of stuff I keep is coincidentally always substantially less than the current batch of reasonably priced large hard drives.
And the file above? From 1986, if memory serves. I wrote it while working at MIT, and it became the basis of the Attraction screen saver in Linux (JWZ's version that's in the screen-saver package doesn't reflect the slow gracefulness of the original, though; someday I need to submit a patch to fix that). It's a Lisp file from a TI-Explorer Lisp Machine (named RTS-23) that was my desktop box in the late 80s.
I realize that not everyone generates the amount of data I do, and many generate much, much more, or have responsibility for potentially restoring much, much more, but for me, always keeping my stuff on spinning media has worked really well. Given the recent explosion of digital photography and ripping my entire CD collection, that means I've got about 2TB these days, but that costs only a handful of hundred dollars with the local and remote RAID backup systems so why screw around with tape or more complex systems?
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
A much harder problem is the Hewlett Packard 4145A Semiconductor Parameter Analyzer, which uses a 5 1/2" disc, with a non-standard hardware interface and non-standard track spacing on the disc, and there I admit I'm pretty much hosed if the disc ever fails, since it reads boot information off the disc every time it starts, and checks for an intentionally damaged track as a copy-protection scheme.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Technically, the oldest file I've transferred from one -medium to another- so far was a 35-year old picture, going from Kodak photo paper to .jpg. I'm fairly certain this occurs quite regularly in projects that archive documents that date back thousands of years (now there's hard core data transfer.
In all seriousness, I used to write translation programs to go from 1980s proprietary formats to, sadly, late 1990s proprietary formats, so probably a 15 year digital to digital format transfer, give or take. These days I aim for searchable .pdf and have had pretty good luck.
"Hey, I know what we're gonna do today." -- Phineas Flynn
I have on my shelf my senior year backup tape, which contains all the files from college that I'd accumulated. I graduated in 1978. Fortunately I've not had any reason to attempt to restore any of this lovely SNOBOL or FORTRAN IV code.
It's not really a backup/restore because the data was already sitting there on my current SATA system drive, but I had reason recently to dig through a couple layers of emulation/virtualization to get at some old files from my Psion Revo, a 1990s-vintage PDA. I have a backup of the Psion's entire file system as it was when I finally retired it, which I could theoretically restore to the device itself, but it's barely functional (expired battery and damaged hinge). Instead I access the files by running Psion's app development emulator, which runs under Windows XP. But I run mostly OS X these days, so I run Windows under VMWare Fusion on my iMac.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
restored from cdrom in summer of 2010. Burned somewhere around 1995.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
I was dragged into helping to recover the Stanford SAIL-DART archives from the 1970s. Those were on 6250 BPI open-reel magnetic tape, which had been copied from the original 800 BPI tapes in a previous decade. The data was in a special character set only used at Stanford, and the format was nonstandard.
The first step was to just copy the tapes onto disks, with no translation. That was done with a tape drive used was from an old Sun-II rackmount system. It took about twenty minutes for each tape, and I was one of the people doing tape changing. The data was then shipped over the Internet to a big disk farm at IBM Almaden for further processing. Eventually, all the text files were converted to Unicode, and individuals were contacted to find out if it was OK to release their personal files from decades ago.
The oldest file I can find in that archive is this one from 1971. It's a list of the people responsible for each node on the ARPANET.
Heaven permitting, In 2011 I plan on making a back-up of my mother and father's 27 year old DNA dumps. The compression is lossy but I've a few million redundant copies.
Native solutions are rated higher than emulation
Sheesh, tell me about it.
10 years is not that long, but more to the point, if I am looking for a file on media that is so old, then it must be archived not backed up. A backup is something you keep if you want to safeguard against loss of data on whatever you use as an active data store. An archive is somewhere safe you keep something when you no longer have a regular need to access it, but may still need it in the future. The methods and media for backups and archives are often the same/similar, but in the case where you have something archived, one would assume there is no "live" copy and therefore the archive should itself be backed up.
Given the rate of storage capacity expansion and my comparatively pedestrian storage requirements, my archive policy is that it stays on my computer, and simply doesn't get accessed. That way it's always backed up using my most current backup regime (rsnapshot at the moment), my "archive" isn't really an archive at all, and I don't have to worry about the media getting old, because it's guaranteed to be on my most recent media - the media I use daily.
That data eventually went by way of comma delimited format into an early Palm Pilot [An IBM branded model], and then into later Palm Pilots. I still have that data, much amended, to this day and still on a Palm and in the PC based software for Palm.
I still have all that TI99/4a hardware, but haven't run it for a couple of decades.
my stone tablets have a life span of around 2000 years +
I have (in my old computer, which is still around) a floppy drive. The drive still works, and I just may keep at least the drive around, as I have very old disks kicking around here. The disks have data from the late 1980's and early 1990s. One 3.5" floppy has data that was put onto it from a 5.25 inch floppy (those floppies, disk drive, etc. went to the great bit bucket in the sky and recycling bin years ago). So *That* data was created about 1987 or 1988 ~22 years ago. In hind sight, its kind of pathetic that digital data is only 22 years old and people are saying "From a 5.25" floppy? From a 5.25" floppy?" and yet books written 3000 years ago are still around (Biblical Texts, Greek poets, ancient records). Sure, some of it was written on clay tablets, but the clay baked and formed a very long lasting archive. Digital data has a hard time being recoverable after 20 years or so. 20 years, that's it. Usually the medium changes to bigger and better, and even though 50 old disks fit onto 1 new one, few (me included) take the time to preserve old data. When archaeologists look at this period of history in 1000 years or so, will they regard it as 'the lost early digital period?" I describe it this way because NASA had a hard time recovering the original footage of Neil Armstrongs steps on the moon. It was recorded in a high definition slow scan format, (and also lo definition TV). The tv footage is common. The Hi-Def stuff was a bear to recover, because NASA had to build a format reader to read the old data, then record from the old media to new media. The pictures are (a lot) better than the TV archives. But in order to view them, they had to build from scratch a new reader, since the last of the old technology filled a landfill years ago. If they didn't have blueprints or plans, the data would be lost to history.
About 5 years ago (2005) I went looking for some old software. Found it in tar format on a 4mm DAT backup tape created in 1986.
2005 - 1985 = 19
The oldest files I've recovered are some text files written with Vizawrite 64 (Commdore 64) dating back to 1985 and imported on PC through a still working Commodore 1541 disk drive and a custom-made USB interface for it. For the records: yes, these disks are still working perfectly after 25 years, and some of them were not even branded. Of course this stuff works through emulation. For not emulation stuff, the oldest things I have are word processing files created with the Cloanto C-1 Text on a Commodore Amiga in 1989. They were copied on DOS standard 3.5 disks when I switched to Macintosh using a software on the Amiga that read / wrote DOS disks, and since then they have been copied on every system I brought through the years. Open Office sneezes a bit at them but eventually loads them correctly.
I have a printout of the source code to a program which ran on the XDS-940 prototype. This KSR-33 was the sole input and output to which I had access. Does that count?
I used to have some punch card programs (CDC 6400) but I don't think I still have them. At least I haven't seen them the last few moves.
Infuriate left and right
For long term archival we're looking at PDFs (compliant to PDF/A-1b - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A for more information). Not quite sure what media will be... probably CD-RWs triple burnt and stored in different locations for redundancy.
Mostly, though, just try to remember to move stuff onto new media before the old becomes hopelessly old :)
I have archived backups from 1990(s) on Zips
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
The oldest file that I don't need to restore (but can obviously restore in case my disk crashes) dates from April 1, 1992.
The oldest file that I can restore easily, will most likely be from the summer of 1989. That would be the original source file of a public domain program that I wrote at that time (released first in the early nineties, but I have the complete history all the way back to 1989 on backup). But I also might still have a LaTeX copy of my master's thesis from earlier that year hidden somewhere.
The oldest file that I can restore at all, must date from about 1987. This, however, requires me to dig up a working DOS machine (doable, because my father still has one of those dinosaurs - now unused, but still booting if needed).
Linux user since early January 1992.
I have some tapes with my VIC 20 that have all of the programs that I spent all night typing in from the code books I bought (still have also). These would be from christmas 1981 and beyond.I wrote some microcontroller code to decode the bits from a standard casette player, and my boss wrote some PC softwar in Matlab to decode it with the soundcard. We had a little christmas challenge back in 2004 to see who could do (code) it faster and decode it more accurately. Ahhh good Times!
I was lucky enough to find some LOGO files on a 5 1/4 floppy from the summer of 1980 that I opened a few years ago. I reapired this RRRFOld Compaq "Laptop Portable Computer" for work that had both types of floppy drive in it. I spent days going thru all of my old 5 1/4 stuff and putting it on 3 1/2 floppies, and then into my 3 backup drives.
My 1982 Small Engine Inventory database from 4th grade is as funny as it gets!
Engine : 7 Hp Tecumseh
Status : Big hole in block
Location: Behind garden in weeds
Happy Holidays!
I run Tivoli Storage Manager storing data on a DS4500 IBM Tape Library. We are now using LTO4 tapes and drives. We migrate every 5 years from the previous tape spec to the most current. There's a Petebyte or so of data that's more than ten years old, and has been migrated at least three times, once to a new tape library, three times across tape versions. Thanks to archives where I work that have to be kept for 25 years, it was a planning requirement.
The simple fact of archive retention is this, you migrate your data. Never let your media get old enough to be a problem. It's expensive and time consuming, but if you really want to keep it, *PLAN* to keep it.
No, you have to nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
Tried that. The human race that sprang back is even worse than last time. The big brained ones lost out this time. I think others ate the backup DNA.
Sometime humanity seems such a mess, it feels like time to say "fork it".
Dumping 26 year old Sega SC-3000 tapes to MP3
http://www.stickfreaks.com/sc3000h.php
I recently consolidated all my instant messaging logs, but ICQ for Mac has been abandoned since 2003 and uses a weird binary file format that's never been fully documented. So I wrote a tool to parse the parts I could figure out, and extract them into Adium-format logs: http://github.com/vasi/icq-mac-export . Thanks to the Miranda folks for putting up docs for a related format here: http://code.google.com/p/mataes/source/browse/Miranda/Plugins/Dbx_mmap_sa/import_sa/docs/import-ICQ_Db_Specs.txt
"Hey, who took the cork off my lunch?" -- W. C. Fields
Even though they fit in you hand, incredibly as we approach 2011 you can still buy "smart" telephones which need wires to transfer your data over, for example songs you may have paid someone to hold you to ransom to for the rest of your life. Being so primitive (or is the reason more sinister?) they obviously don't have memory slots or are compatible with the rest of the industry via USB or bluetooth, but even with all these glaring omissions they remain popular with people who prefer style over substance. If users want to transfer data between these devices in 10 years time they had better hope their manufacturer is still around and willing, probably for a hefty price, to help them out.
In the mid 1970s, I got some cheaply made 45-rpm LP records with Christmas songs I liked ("Icycles holly red berries and snow", "I want an elephant for Christmas" etc). In the early 1990s, these records were so shot that I recorded them to cassette. In the late 1990s, I digitized this cassette and made a CD. Then I ripped the CD and put the songs on my iPod Touch. I listened to them over the weekend. Since the original records were so poorly made, the sound quality is about the same. This may not be a backup, but it's just as important to me.
I needed a file I created in about 1984-6 with MacDraw (original and 1.9) (OS 4.2) on a Mac Plus. The file was created on a 3.5" floppy and translated to an Iomega 10mb disc via SCSI a couple of years later, then to a Zip disc several years after that, then top a CD. I needed to view, open, edit and ave the file to reuse it today (export to gif and export to pdf). I used a PowerBook G4-867 running Classic 9.2.2, set the screen resolution under Classic to a lower setting that would not freak out MacDraw, I opened it under MacDraw II, edited the file, saved it to the local HD, did a screen capture and converted it to gif using Graphic Converter. I went back into Classic and to Chooser and selected Print to PDF, a utility I downloaded from shareware.com, reset the page setup and saved the output as a pdf.
That was not my oldest file. I needed to run a BASIC program I wrote in 1981-2 at college on the PDP-11 on my Dad's teacher account so it would survive between quarters. I downloaded it via 150-300 baud Bell acoustic modem to a Xerox 820 running CP/M and saved the file to an 8-1/2" floppy. When I got my first PCAT clone in 85 or so I saved all the files to the HD over a serial connection and modem software and then to 3.5" floppies. Those floppies took the same path as the files above to Bernoulli and beyond. I needed to run it this week so I downloaded Chipmunk BASIC for the Mac, opened it up and ran it. There were a couple of formatting errors so I corrected those real quick and ran it again.
Done.
boobs.gif from 1993
I pulled some old cassettes, ranging in age of between 20 and 25 years, out of storage and sampled them into WAVs, then used CS1er and Tape994a to decode the data and load them into emulators. As well, I used the same program(s) to convert the data back into audio and played into a real TI console.
Meh. Not overly challenging in description, but getting the right noise adjustment, tone and volume settings took quite a bit of time to get just right. And each recording needed its own settings. I found that for playback into a real TI-99/4A console from my laptop used the "Reggae" equalizer setting in VLC Player.
Back in 2007 I was writing a short biography for a college writing class about my high school years, and referenced a story I had written in 1984 on my old Atari 800. My teacher was intrigued, so I pulled the boxes of Atari stuff out of the basement and found the 5 1/4 floppy that had the file. I then used my Atari Floppy disk hooked up to my PC with the PC Xformer cable and an emulater that would read the disks and save them as image files. Once the files were saved, I pulled the text out using dd. Very complex setup for 5 pages of text, but was fun to do. It was also interesting to see how my writing style has changed in ~23 years.
Disk is cheap and I've never had to restore data from more than 6 months ago. Sure, I've got stacks of older hard drives (it's a chuckle to see "big" 80gb drives and "small" 2gb drives), but I've never had to go back to them.
As disk is cheap, my data has basically moved with me. Anything that I need that I'd have to go back in time is just dated that way (GnuCash, financial reports, etc.) and still on my current hard drive and daily/weekly/monthly/yearly grandfathering backup.
The only downside is that the amount of data I have just keeps growing. But disk is cheap, and if it doesn't change rsync doesn't care and backups go fast.
Speaking of, I should pick up a new 2tb backup drive, as my current 1tb backup drive is about a year old (and the .5tb drive before won't hold my daily/weekly/monthly/yearly backups without me doing some pruning of full system backups due to rolling Fedora upgrades).
I can't remember the last time I had a hard drive failure, but short of 3 disk failures at the same time on 3 different systems, I'd never lose data.
I think one reason I never have disk failure is that I don't keep drives with critical longer than 2-3 years.
I once needed to pull a few graphics files off of an Apple IIgs that were made in Paintworks. Unfortunately, they were in a format that no one else used. After some digging, I was able to find a program called Super-High-Res Convert that could convert them to GIF files. From there, I had to put them on an 800k floppy, then put said floppy into an old Mac (with IIgs disk format support) that had ethernet on it and a drive old enough to support 800k floppies. From there, I was able to pull it over the network. Worked fine.
Slightly off topic, but data is easy to recover! The real problem is when old hardware is required for certain things.
For example:
My uncle works for a university in the UK. They have a ~£70K machine for chemical analysis, I forget what exactly now.
It came with a special 8bit ISA interface card, and talks to a DOS program on a nearby PC. But the PC died. Now ISA slots remained common, they thought no problem....but the software refuses to run on computers which have a processor faster than 100MHz.
This time around, we managed to find a old 486 for them, load it up with a new HDD, CD drive and floppy drive, those having had problems. When the computer fails again in 7-10 years time....will we be able to find something old enough again?
For pure age of the data I don't think you can really beat vinyl unless you get into the written word, I mean 50-60 year old albums are pretty common and I've seen stories of people doing 100 or better year old albums. Now of course it isn't very complex.... just plug the player into your computers sound in, but if all you're intrested in age I think it's pretty much unbetable unless you're counting the scanning dead sea scrolls or something.
Technology, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.
The best method is to subject the object to a Plasma stream. Works for Magnetic, Optical, Electrical and Thermal storage mediums.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
I bought a DAT tape drive and a handful of tapes on a radio-amateur swapmeet. :-)
At home I hooked the DAT drive up to the TT's SCSI chain and fired the TT up.
The DAT drive was recognized and I made a backup of the old Quantum 80 MB 5 1/4 inch SCSI drive (my TT sits in a big tower).
When the backup was completed (and verified) I switched the TT off and it went literally with a bang and an awful rattling noise.
After examination the Quantum drive's top lid showed a strange circular pattern as if something had been punching out from the inside.
When I removed the lid I saw one of the heads had become separated from the arm and had been 'rolling' between the top platter and the lid.
Needless to say this drive was shot.. I replaced the 5 1/4 drive with a 'more modern' DEC RZ28 2GB SCSI drive (these must have cost a fortune back then)
and restored everything from the DAT tape I had made before... That was ten years ago.. The files on the TT are from the late eighties.
The tapes are still readable. The TT is still working, I switch it on once a year
I have an e-mail from Antarcica - from 1994. Yup, I have been thinking of framing it. :)
I started making regular backups onto tapes when I got a bargain on a QFA-700 tape drive in 1992 that used DC5150 and DC6250 tapes. I transferred these to CDR in 2000. These I can still read. Have not tried the tapes but do have 3 of the drives with which to rely on. I do however have 5.25 inch disks from my Apple II that were last written to in 1982 and still readable.
Some systems have an option to fully overwrite the files instead of simply deleting the references to the files. Also, it wouldn't be hard to imagine that an algorithm to overwrite a disk could fail when finding a bad spot on the drive, and fail to finish the job.
http://www.deviceside.com/
Device Side Data's flagship product is the FC5025 USB 5.25" floppy controller. The FC5025 plugs into any computer's USB port and enables you to attach a 5.25" floppy drive. Even if your computer has no built-in floppy controller, the FC5025 lets you read those old disks. And it's not just for IBM PC disks – it also understands formats used by Apple, Atari, Commodore and TI, among others.
This may not count since it was in the 1990s (so the mid-1970s were a lot more recent then), but I read what I understood to be the original source code for MBASIC-80 off of PDP-10 DECtapes for one of Paul Allen's people. (If the stories we've all heard are true, MBASIC-80 was originally cross-assembled on PDP-10s, starting at Harvard before Microsoft was founded.)
The hardware was a PDP-11/34a with a TC11/TU56 DECtape rig, with FILEX.SAV on RT-11 and also my own home-grown utility that takes snapshots of tapes in 18-bit mode. The TU56 drive crapped out in the middle of it all, which was really embarrassing since I had to repair it in front of the Vulcan guy (who'd flown across the country just to visit my squalid nerd lair, but apparently working DECtape gear was rare enough that he didn't have much choice), but at least the whole thing was successful.
Check out
http://explorer.cyberstreet.com/CET4970H-Peterson-Thesis.pdf
My oldest would have to be building an entire PC out of one of my "junkers" to save and restore an entire DOS 3 OS. At the shop I was working at the time this guy comes in in a panic and says 'Please tell me you have a machine that will run this and know how to set it up?" and he pulls out this big ass old ISA card. It turns out his dad owns a big lumber company and they had this big contract that required some custom columns as part of the deal. Wouldn't you know it, the first time junior talks his dad into taking a vacation and letting him be in charge the computer that controls the lathe that makes the columns shits itself and dies. Now this thing was older than dirt and from what I found out later these machines cost anywhere from 75k UP, and naturally the company that made it had been out of business damned near 15 years, so good luck finding a way to upgrade.
So when Doug the boss tells the guy "We don't have anything that old on hand, I can get you one in about a week" the poor kid looked like he was gonna cry. He had been to every shop in town and got told the same thing and the job had to be DONE in 4 days, or goodbye big juicy contract. The kid knew that any chance he had to take over the business was going up in smoke faster than that old 10MHz Intel that had been running that lathe. So needless to say I thought the kid was gonna drop dead from a heart attack right there when I looked over from my spot in the back and said "Hey, I think I got a couple of boxes that'll run that at home." The kid was like "I'll pay, extra, overtime, whatever, but I HAVE TO HAVE it ASAP!" So I swung by my house while the kid waited there ready to crap his pants, because he was sure I'd come back and say I was mistaken, but no. I have always been a pack rat and can't stand throwing out working gear and still had my old first gamer PCs, one a 100MHz that I used for the first DOOM, the other a 233MHz with a Voodoo 1 that was my first Quake box, and both with ISA slots.
So I have the kid fetch the dead box, which was so full of sawdust and gunk it was a miracle it had lasted that long, but lucky for him the 20MB HDD (yeah 20MB, they don't make them like that old heavy dinosaur anymore) would still spin up, so I worked through the evening cloning the DOS 3 install to the 2 drives, getting DOS drivers for the hardware, sealing them so the sawdust wouldn't get sucked in etc. By morning they were done and I was out there setting up the lathe as well as showing him how to spin up the spare once a month so if it happened again he would be able to just pull the first and not suffer any downtime. When that lathe fired up and started cutting those columns that kid jumped a good 3 feet in the air and you would have thought he won the lotto. Good thing I still knew my DOS huh? Anyway he ended up paying me nearly $500 for the nights work, another $300 for the boxes, and at the end of the week when the contract was completed and daddy was back running the company he walked in and handed me $500 and told my boss "Don't you let this one get away, he really knows his stuff!" which made me feel nice.
And the moral of the story is this: If your company depends on something funky and old to function, have an emergency plan, okay? I ran into the kid at the local mall about 6 months ago and asked how it was going. He said that he fires up that 233MHz every month just like clockwork as I taught him, and has the OS image put up in several places on several mediums like I taught him, but that 100MHz is happily working 8 hours a day, 6 days a week. It kinda gives me a warm fuzzy to know the first box I hunted CacoDemons on is still working like a champ. Some said I should have reamed the kid on the price, since he needed them so much, but by being square with the kid not only did we end up with the job modernizing their offices, but they probably threw us another $10k-$20k worth of work for businesses and families that were connected to them. So it pays in the long run to treat people with fairness, and not try to gouge them just because they are in a bad way.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
There is nothing from 10 years ago I can't use now. In fact some of my CD-Rs are older than 10 years old. If I wanted to I could boot up my old win 3.11 machine and put data onto my newer machines over the network and that's over 15 years old.
There shouldn't be any reason to be concerned about 10 year old back-ups unless it's important data, you have one copy and it's backed up onto something that's not known for lasting or is stored poorly.
hardcopies already won this contest. 2500+ years BC.
For every benefit you receive a tax is levied. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
The teacher who ran the school's computer lab in the 1980s sent me the floppy discs from the fileserver (dated 1989). We had a network of BBC Micros and Masters (which used Econet networking), and in those days had an SJ Research fileserver, which had a hard disc plus two floppy drives. A friend and I wrote a multi-user dungeon to run on econet.
So a couple of months back I received all the floppies, written in 1989 on the SJ fileserver, which used a filesystem called MDFS.
The discs all read perfectly. I used a USB stick to transfer the "SJFiler" program - downloaded it to my Mac, copied it to the USB pendrive, and connected the pendrive to my BBC Master (which has something called a "Datacentre" - which is an IDE interface plus USB interface for the BBC Micro/Master) and used SJFiler to read the discs. So I can get all the stuff back that I wrote in the mid to late 1980s for the Beeb (programs, data files etc.) It was quite amusing browsing some of the files :-)
I have to do a bit of work to recover all the data - the problem being that SJFiler doesn't make disc images, and ADFS (the native format supported by my BBC Master) can't store as many files in a single directory as MDFS can, and many of the directories on the MDFS floppies have far more files than the ADFS limit (I think it's something like 63 files per directory in ADFS).
I have a whole pile of DFS discs for the Beeb, and all of them still work, many are almost 30 years old. The 5.25 inch floppies are so much more reliable than the later 3.5in drives (particularly the floppies from 2000+ - often they would last one read cycle before failing).
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I have a FORTRAN program from 1970 on punch cards. I don't have a reader, but I have a scanner. The image processing to recover the code from the hole patterns shouldn't be too difficult.
yippy is it longest running hard drive?
I am certainly not the only person here with boxes of 5.25 floppies around and no working drive to read them... Has anyone found a way to read them directly on a modern system? All of mine are DOS formatted so at least the file system isn't anything too odd. I've expected a 5.25" USB drive to pop up somewhere but as best I know that hasn't yet happened.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I have a few hundred files worth of Atari and Commodore data from the 80s. In their original format they took up a few cases of floppies. It was actually pretty easy to read them with some emulation software under Linux. Now, alas, I don't have any floppy drives on any of my machines. VLC still plays the audio files and Imagemagick can read the image files. All told about a gig worth of data. Though I'm usually pretty good about purging old cruft, all of it takes up such a small amount of space that I still keep them hanging around.
I recently "recovered" around 30 PowerPoint files that I put together about 17 years ago. None were critically important; just some crude stop motion movies, homework, and other horrible "paintings", but they're a neat part of my childhood.
At they time, I had put them together using PowerPoint 2.0 (maybe 1.0, but I doubt it) and modern versions have long dropped support for those files. As I researched, I found that a straightforward conversion was impossible. There were specific conversion components for some versions (I think there was a v2 plugin for v3) and support for older formats seemed to be quickly dropped. By investigating installed files and old software reviews, I learned that v3 or v4 would do fine with the v2 files that I had and '98 or 2001 would upgrade the converted files to the "modern" binary format, it didn't look like 98 could read v1 or v2 files. Any of the more recent versions could upgrade those to the new XML format.
So I assembled my tools; I actually already had access to archived installation images for 2001, had installed 2008, and amazingly still had floppies for v4 and even found a *nix box with a floppy drive. I've previously played around with SheepShaver, but running the old Microsoft products proved to be difficult. I don't remember the exact issues, but installation or execution failed consistently when trying to run version 2001. A thread on the SheepShaver forums indicated that running under Ubuntu might be successful, but I didn't have any luck. I did find success running SheepShaver under Windows, and of course running 2008 under Mac OS X 10.6 was just fine.
In the end, my conversion chain looked like this:
10.6 > SheepShaver > MacOS 9.0.4 > PowerPoint v4 - v2 files to v4
Windows 7 > SheepShaver > MacOS 9.0.4 > PowerPoint 2001 - v4 files to modern binary data
10.6 > PowerPoint 2008 - binary files to XML
The only degredation I've noticed is that one file seems to either be using a font I don't have or perhaps the spacing or size was lost as the text doesn't quite line up correctly.
I suppose I should also take a pass through my other files and upgrade any Microsoft data to more modern formats, though nothing goes back as far as these did. Or just print them out to PDF. It's not like I need to actually edit any of these.
What strikes me most is how transient version support was even for Microsoft's own formats. I'd think at the least that Microsoft could keep a basic conversion product going for modern OSs and all the old formats. Not that I actually expect this from them.
-- i am jack's amusing sig file
Back in 2002, I transferred my old BBC micro files from 5 1/4" floppies to disk, for use with an emulator. At that time, the files were at least 13 years old.
Surprisingly, it was easy enough. I dug out the BBC micro and its (full height!) floppy drives, connected them, connected the micro to a TV, booted the thing, and it still worked! Next, I connected the micro to my computer using a serial cable, and used Kermit to transfer the files at (at most) 9600 baud. It took a while, but it worked!
In 2008, I tracked down a USB to Atari drive adapter and a working floppy drive.
It was a fun afternoon finally copying over all those old and long thought lost programs. Only one disk was completely unreadable, and most copied without issue.
I've got text files going back to my Apple //e days, and some image files from my Amiga (Deluxe Paint III FTW!), but I've brought them over and converted them to each new machine as time went on; no need to go back to any originals (which I haven't bothered with, anyway).
That's by far the best method for long-term backups - back up and do any conversion when the new technology is replacing the old - that's when it'll be the easiest to do, as everyone else will be in the same boat, and there will be techniques and products around to do it (because everyone will be in the same boat, there will be financial incentive to supply the ability). The longer you wait, the harder it gets, especially when there are hardware compatibility issues (Apple 5 1/4" floppy drive is very different from a x86 5 1/4" floppy, and you don't even want to think about an Amiga 3.5" floppy).
Backup early and often, and CONVERT early and often, too. Though if you luck you, the longer you wait, the more likely some open source dork will have deciphered an old format and supplied something for free.
You might also look for a vintage computing enthusiast who actually still HAS said old hardware who might also be able to recover something from old disks/formats and be able to help you out when necessary.
Seriously? I'm running 10 yr old hdds in some of my systems :S.
Hell at my work in our DC we have HDDs which are ~7yrs old. Its not like theres been some HUGE change which means this is difficult, it just depends if you backed up properly in the first place.
Biggest issue i've had is finding a suitable desktop system so I can format all these IDE drives we had lying about (80+ and counting). They are getting DBAN shreded then going into a skip..... So in the end I had to find a system which still has ide on board, to be able to format them, with each drive clocking around 7 hours for the "short" DBAN clear.
I'm stuck with a small shuttle PC I found, which will allow me to connect 2 hdds + the cdrom, no matter what I try it wont let me pop a 3rd in. Maybe I could get it doing USB boot to add an extra HDD but after trying for about 20minutes I gave up, sat back and enjoyed the blue and white text counting up on my screen.... Another 40+ to go when I get back to work, fun times ;)
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
But I am positive that the following reply should suffice:
Whooosh!
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
At least it's analog.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
It's 2010. If you're that worried about 3GB of space, I don't know what to tell you - other than, file management is stupid. File footprint, of course grows, but it simply doesn't outpace the natural growth of storage. (Unless a pirate ye be, yarrrr.)
Think of the children. Your great, great, great grandchildren might want to know that their great, great, great grandmother enjoyed lolcats, man.
I still have a colour Classic (Mac) which has an Apple ][ card in it and a 5.25' external drive, plus several old laptops so that, in theroy, I could move files from Apple ][, Mac OS and MacOSX to a current Machine, and there is an IBM XT in the garage as well. In the end it's not the file, it's the format, so many proprietary formats, not enough software.
See Peter Gutmann's Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory from the 6th USENIX Security Symposium Proceedings, San Jose, California, July 22-25, 1996. It certainly surpasses the "urban legend" bar for me (it was peer-reviewed and academically vetted).
Available online here: http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html
The whole paper is worth reading, and it certainly applies to hard drives and not cassettes or earlier meda. A relevant excerpt:
The problem lies in the fact that when data is written to the medium, the write head sets the polarity of most, but not all, of the magnetic domains. This is partially due to the inability of the writing device to write in exactly the same location each time, and partially due to the variations in media sensitivity and field strength over time and among devices.
In conventional terms, when a one is written to disk the media records a one, and when a zero is written the media records a zero. However the actual effect is closer to obtaining a 0.95 when a zero is overwritten with a one, and a 1.05 when a one is overwritten with a one. Normal disk circuitry is set up so that both these values are read as ones, but using specialised circuitry it is possible to work out what previous "layers" contained. The recovery of at least one or two layers of overwritten data isn't too hard to perform by reading the signal from the analog head electronics with a high-quality digital sampling oscilloscope, downloading the sampled waveform to a PC, and analysing it in software to recover the previously recorded signal.
That said, Gutmann later proposed a 2-pass overwrite method that should be sufficient with modern drives, and offered a discussion of why some of the things proposed in the paper are less relevant on modern, denser hard drives than previously:
http://www.forensicswiki.org/wiki/Epilogue_to_Gutmann's_1996_paper
rage, rage against the dying of the light
I have some old CD's (still can be read from 10 years ago). In this CD's i have data that was migrated from my and old 8086 XT . Also have lot of file on Zip drives and keep a USB zip drive around for when i need to use them. From 7 years to now. I been keeping my files on mirrored drives on storage servers (now a applianse that turns disks off if not in use to lower power usage and extend the life of my drives. Should last for a long time as I only use them a few times per week).
It's time to move my data from CD's into the appliance as they are getting close to EOD.
BSD licensed software can't be stolen....
That was something...
My final successful solution:
ChiWriter -> PCL -> PCL emulator -> TIFF -> PDF -> OCR -> OCR PDF
For too young to know:
ChiWriter
Sourceforge started more than 10 years ago. CVS repository is still working.
http://www.geocities.com is dead, but Unicode demo page from 1998 is in archive.org.
I think I still can recover game I played on programmable calculator 20+ years ago. It is still somewhere in my papers. Calculator died more than 20 years ago.
I maintain a legacy system that migrated from 8" to 5.25" to 3.5" floppies in the early 1990s.
Our experience now is that the oldest floppies have bit-rotted and are no longer readable. There is a sweet spot where the data are readable, before floppy quality took a nosedive when floppies ceased to be the main portable storage medium.
Just to make things interesting, the system uses its own unique file system, complete with itsown ideas on tracks and sectors. I figured out how to make Linux boxes read and write such floppies, and made a bootable CD we can give to customers for disaster recovery.
Thanks to hardware and budget restraints, I can't update the system to use more modern storage, like USB.
...laura
Really? The "Y2K non-event?" The only reason it was a non-event was because thousands of us put in a lot of hours making it turn out that way. I worked on a project that, if not tended to, would have been the end of the company using the software and databases in question. That would have definitely been an "event" for them and all of their employees and customers. I'm always a little perplexed by the glib dismissal of that period, but especially so here in this particular venue.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I still have the first program I ever wrote in 1991, age 6. Its on the original PC, under my bed, in my parents house. As accessible as is necessary for my 19 year old data.
"It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes." Douglas Adams
1990-1995: Tapes (tar)
1995-2000: CDs of Tapes
2000-2005: DVDs/disk images (combo) of CDs
2005-2010: A big tarball that I never check with all of the above, typically recursive and duplicates.
(Excuse the dates/years, some might be off. I'm scared to open the big tarball.)
I did a recovery once, vming and re-tarring works well. (unpacking, making the data work in its needed environment/inside a vm, tarring up the vm)
Now if I can only find the tarball..
I must comment on the synopsis of this story. y2k was basically a non-event because thousands of people like me worked our butts off for a couple of years to bring forward our legacy systems and come up with creative ways to do so.
It gets my goat every time I hear somebody who wasn't involved say such ridiculous things.
Now get off my lawn you darn kids!
load "linux",8,1
About file age. If it's data, then anything older a few years iis not worth recovering. If it's software it won't probably run on current hardware/OS. Multimedia files have been replicated on a number of media and don't really need restoration.
So what?
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
Back in 1980 or so, I bought a Heathkit H11 which was a repackaged PDP-11. It had dual 8" floppy drives. I wanted it to implement my Empire game on it, which I did, and distributed a few copies of the binary. When I later got an IBM PC with 5.25" drives, I backed up the Empire source files from the H11 by writing them out to a serial port, and using a program I wrote for the PC that read from the serial port and wrote to a floppy. So far, so good. Eventually, I put all the PDP-11 version of the source code up on my website http://www.classicempire.com./ This year, a person who had a PDP-11 emulator tried to recompile Empire from those sources, and discovered one of the files was missing! Arggh. I had long ago copied all my 5.25 floppies to CD-ROMs, but the file wasn't there, either. I had obviously overlooked backing that one up when transferring the files to the PC. I had thrown out all my paper listings, and just had some handwritten code on notepaper (I use to write code that way, later typing it in). I gave away my H11 in the 80's, but the person I gave it to had thrown it in the trash (too bad, they are valuable collector's items now). But I did have the old 8" floppies. If only I could read them, and if only they were even readable after 27 years. I emailed my old friend from college, Shal Farley, who now runs Cheshire Engineering. He said he had an old 11 in the back room, it had an 8" drive and an ftp server on it, but he hadn't fired it up in years. I sent him the floppies, and wouldn't ya know, it worked perfectly and he imaged the floppies (about 8 of them). Every single byte read without error! I was amazed. He was kind enough to email me the contents, and I added it to the web site. I'm grateful to Shal for rescuing my data! When I backed up my 5.25" floppies to CD about 12 years ago, about 90% copied without errors. The ones before 1985 were nearly all thoroughly unreadable, though, which is why I figured the older 8" ones would be quite useless.
I have some Commodore PET tapes and Floppies that I can read, fortunately the 2040/4040 and c2n are compatible with the Commodore 64's 1541 and 1531. I do also have on hand an SFD-1001 and a PET to read the 8050 and 8250 disks people send to have converted as well.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
TRS80 Model 4 with 4 160KB 5inch floppies, 2 1.2MB 8 inch floppies, 5MB hard disk, Tandy 132 column printer. Had to move program sources from this PC to a Windows 7 Intel Core2 DUO PC. The programs where FORTRAN and C sources. This PC runs CP/M, so I copied the source files at 300baud via serial port to new PC. SO I went from 1983 "backup" floppies to present day. Almost 28 year time span
There are two reasons for that.
First of all, it was hyped beyond all reason. Hell, there were hardware stores selling flashlight with "Y2K safe" (or something along those lines) tags. The media portrayed it as if the planes would fall from the skies, the hospital machinery would break down and the world as we knew it would be about to end.
The second part is that while we knew that some software would be affected, we knew that all such critical software would be fixed by projects like the one you talk about. IE: Even if air control systems would suffer from that flawed code, the companies responsible for those would fix them. So instead of "The planes will fall from the sky" it would be "Some companies have to do some investments to prvent major problems".
Those two being taken into account... Yeah, it was a non-event. Something like 99.9% of the people suffered nothing more than seeing the wrong date on some website after the media had spent months mongering fear. It wasn't a non-issue for IT-companies but for everyone else... Two hours of FaceBook downtime leaves a bigger impact.
I used to work for a company that provided real estate database services. We were pulled into court by a patent troll claiming their mapping search patent was being infringed by our search applications. We had to pull together a PDP chassis and enough cards to boot, but we were able to read 15+ year old archive tapes. The prize, we offered mapping based searches in the 80's on dial up terminals. Source code, written in MACRO-11, PDP assembler, showing prior art. Historical contract files documented selling this feature to customers.
The moral, even when you retire a platform and application, holding backup tapes can have value. Second, keep some way to read the silly thing around.
A few months ago, I stumbled on a box full of DAT backup tapes from the early 90's. Back then I was getting a "full" USENET feed from UUnet via a 56K link using CNEWS plus a bunch of custom hacks on a BSDI box running on some uber expensive 486DX system. In those days I did a simple dump of each filesystem to DAT once a day so a simple restore was able to recover data from a few of the tapes on my CentOS 5.5 desktop. A lot of the tapes had become unreadable though. One of the readable ones contained my news spool for a downstream site. :)
Amazing what seemed to be "risque" on alt.sex.* is now fodder for Oprah on weekday mornings. LOL
Best,
I have some Quark XPress files from Macintosh OS that even Indesign (which is excellent at importing old data files) cannot handle, but it has managed some that are over 10 years old. I know this is not what this question is about, but I have some files of various formats, some recent, some old, that have been corrupted but that I need back. Any ideas how I can recover them? Most are Adobe Illustrator or Quark files, and a few others Word docs. Reply at 'wazzupalex AT gmail DOT COM' and here on on /.
Cheers.
I've still got backup from the early 80's. For example those one disk, 5.25 inch self-booting, games for the PC. For example Karateka. I have them stored in Copy II PC image files.
The reason I still have them is due to data migration. Once a new technology came out I shifted my backups forwards. Luckily the data density usually went up quite a bit as well so I wasn't stuck with (relative) big backups.
For 'Karateka' my migration path was as follows:
* I had it 1:1 on floppy (360 KB)
* Transfers via Copy II PC images to 3.5 disks (1.4 MB)
* Later I got a 20MB harddisk and a QIC-80 tapedrive. So they landed on tape.
* Then we got ZIP drives (100mb). However the 'Click of death' issue had me looking for something else.
* Then my first CD recorder (650mb). Here backups started becoming big because I got access to the Internet (early 90's). I had a lot more stuff I wanted to keep.
* Forward to my first DVD recorder, where I started migrating a lot of stuff from CD. Thanks to Daemontools and CloneCD I was able to copy a lot of CD's to image files.
* From DVD's (which took forever to burn) I went to harddisks in USB housings. To save time mostly and due to DVD rot. Also I used a lot of very cheap DVD-R's, so data retention was up to 4-5 years on some batches.
* Now I'm trying to go from USB housed HDD's to a RAID-5 file server. Mostly because my external drives go up to 1.5TB and I don't have double backups on non-important data but I'd still like to keep a lot of stuff more 'safe'. 1.5TB is a lot to lose in one go.
The only 'trouble' I could run into now is that my oldest files are in archaic data formats. Luckily I kept all the utilities needed to access them. Think Copy II PC and the compression utilities I used at the time:, ARC, LHA, ARJ, ICE, UC2.
So for long term backups I give this advice:
* Migrate your data
* Keep multiple backups
* Make sure you can access your data formats
* Keeping backups is expensive. Consciously decide what you want to keep.
Also a useful tactic is to copy data between friends. (This is what I did when I was young). That way there's always somebody who still has what you want.
I still have the source code in 1 file of my degree project from 1974/5.
This was cross assembler (written in Fortran) for an NatSemi 4 bit micro.
It ran on PDP 11 Dos V8. It is some 1150+ lines of code.
It has moved from Dos V8 RK05 -> via Paper Tape to RSX11-D-> RSX11-M-> VMS V1.5->VMS-V6->Windows 3.1->NT->XP->Linux
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
files from 1991. The main file tree living in /home/win is the one I started on my first DOS machine and has been transferred to Win3.1, W98, Fedora Core, Debian, Kubuntu. Somehow, it's grown in that time from 20 megs to 200G.
I've had 2 drive crashes in that time, the first bare-metal restore was a restore from tape which blew up the first time because the Sony Superstation Windows software would not read the whole file and they no longer supported it... customer service said go to the vendor they originally bought it from and d/l a trial version. The second crash was on Debian, I simply plugged in the backup hard drive and was getting an RMA from Maxtor tech support within 10 minutes.
As for reading 1990s files, all I had to do was figure out how to use the CLI LZH format archive program jhla-utils to decompress the files. Anything I've got from then that's still usable is text files or lotus 123 (clone) spreadsheets I can open from OpenOffice Calc.
Tech Public Policy stuff
1 year was the oldest file I've ever restored. That is our retention policy. That policy is enforced automatically by our backup software as the encryption keys get deleted on a hourly schedule. You can leave the tapes around with the write tab set thinking you'll be able to recover the data later but it will be useless without the key. Of course we still have data older than 1 year in the active file systems.
Having data on 5.25" disks might be no big deal, but we got a call from a guy just recently wanting us to make some copies of an application activation disk that was 5.25". It's a copy protected disk and obviously the media is subject to bitrot. Apparently we (the company I work for) made some copies many years ago (5.25" disks were old even then!) but they were down to their last few and wanted some more copies made. They weren't interested in any offer to assist in migrating to something newer.
I've got some old Amstrad CPC 464 tapes around that may still be readable... I wrote something to read the data off them through the soundcard about 10 years ago.
i have some punch cards in a shoebox. i could "restore" from backup as long as i dont shake the box
I have a deck of punch cards from High School circa 1975 that I can restore into a usable format without too much difficulty.
5 hours in a 150 electric oven in the kitchen is how I bake old open reel audio tapes that need transferred.
I charge $275 an hour to recover files from any medium, any era. If you need to recover something. Check the yellow pages.
Imported my games written 27 years ago on my Texas Instruments TI 99 4a! Had the cassette tapes, sampled them using my linux laptop and converted the audio to bytes for the emulator.
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Immaculate_Backup_.aspx
I've got QIC-24 tapes that contain COBOL code that I wrote back in 1983. Several months ago I was given an old QIC tape drive and to test it I dumped out this code and compiled it. Looking at this code my first thought was "What was I thinking? This code sucks."
Another day closer to redwood heaven
This was about 3 years ago. Both were 100% successful, and not terribly difficult. The C64 disks were from Circa 1987, so 20 years old. The Amiga HD was circa 1994, so 14 years old. Neither one of the media were particularly well stored. I've also recovered analog audio data off of reel to reel tape that was 30 years old.
Personally I think all the fear surrounding losing data after a long period of time is largely unfounded.
If you used good media and stored it properly then you'll have no problem restoring the files. I've taken files off of CDs that I made 10 years ago with no problem.
About 2 years ago I restored a bunch of dodgy early 80s microbee computer tapes. Involved a bit of work with audio filters and custom code, but it was doable. I guess it depends on how much effort you're willing to put in.
I have documents from 1999 and earlier that in 1999 were stored on a 6 gigabyte HFS+ FireWire disk which would plug on to my 2010 MacBook Pro and be completely accessible if the disk mechanism would spin up. But every few years I just copied all the files to a fresh disk mechanism in a newer HFS+ FireWire/USB2 disk, which was pretty painless: a few minutes to format the new disk with HFS+, and a few minutes to copy over the 5-6 gigabytes of files. Since 2006 or so the files have also been backed up by Time Machine to a bigger USB2 disk, and since 2008 or so there is another backup on a Drobo and since 2009 another backup on an online backup service. All of these are always accessible.
As far as formats:
Adobe Photoshop documents just open in the latest Photoshop
Adobe Illustrator documents just open in the latest Illustrator
Adobe Flash documents just open in the latest Flash
TrueType and Type 1 fonts still work with Mac OS X
HTML or plain text documents just open in Safari for viewing or BBEdit for editing
JPEG photos and PNG graphics just open in Safari or Quick Look or pretty much anywhere for viewing or Photoshop for editing
Logic documents open in the latest Logic Pro, and the 24-bit 44.1kHz AIFF audio tracks play in iTunes or open for playing or editing in all of my pro audio apps
DV and MPEG-2 movies open in Compressor for viewing or converting
Keeping this data live is very valuable but it has been really, really easy.
In a pinch I've had to exchange files between a vintage 1979 Apple II+ and my MacBook Pro. I found I could span thirty years of desktop evolution by using the Apple's old cassette port and my laptop's copy of QuickTime! Why did I need this? I was working on this very low-fi music video here: http://stewd.io/w/jed I released my Applesoft BASIC source code (which you can download here: http://stewd.io/jed) and this eventually lead to Panic Software using iTunes on an iPad to load the code onto their old Apple //e which they documented here: http://www.panic.com/blog/2010/05/an-apple-e-an-ipad-and-jed/. Thank you audio ports!! It's really made me think about how I archive my files and what my contingencies might be for opening them in another 30 years if need be. Scares me a bit.
Although the combination of tar, split and cat (the last two for splitting/joining tar archives) work well for me, I've seen old time mainframe system programmers haul around 1800bpi/6250bpi round reel tapes with their stuff on em from job to job. They seem to work
Totally agreed! Although I wasn't one of the people who worked their butts off, I do know that it's thanks to a whole lot of people and a whole lot of effort that nothing came of Y2K.
As far as the article submitter, let's figure out what his story is. He's most likely 18-23, and he clearly doesn't have a reasonable understanding of the history of computers (10 years old a long time? Not understanding why Y2K was avoided, etc). Oh, and he's most certainly the junior guy in the department since he got stuck working BOTH Xmas and NY. Here's hoping he might learn a little bit and grow up some, though.
Hell, I have files on my current hard drive that date back to February 12, 1987.
1982 - Neatly-typed Sinclair ZX81 games I wrote and sold through the mail.
ffdshow has support for Indeo 2 and 3 at the very least. This is based on the video format list in the configuration dialog box. I haven't got anything to test against but I have no reason to doubt it. Check it out - http://ffdshow-tryout.sourceforge.net/ - open source and has support for Windows 7. There are also some 64-bit builds you can try.
This is exactly the reason why I started working on my own archiving / version control application. I use it to store my most important large files, like photos and videos. It uses a completely transparent, very simple repository format. It's quite powerful, and at the same time, even if the original software is unavailable, any programmer will be able to extract the files from the repository in half an hour. It's a little bit like a version control system (like subversion, git, etc), but suitable for large files. It is named "boar" (Big Object ARchiver... or something like that). Check it out on google code, http://code.google.com/p/boar/ Help and/or suggestions are very welcome!
What do you mean by file? If you are refering to an executable program, then I can still run a Draw Poker program from the mid-1980s for the original IBM-PC. It needs an auxiliary program that configures my 2 GigaHertz/2 Gigabyte DRAM Dell to be a mid-1980s IBM-PC with EGA-level video. And I can still run a 1988-era PCB layout program ORCAD ver 2, but not the Schematic Capture section with the XT emulator.
I can still load BASIC programs for the Radio Shack MC-10 micro color computer (the 'Alice') using a cassette tape recorder or an MC10-emulator for the PC. This is the version of BASIC that Bill Gates personally wrote for Radio Shack before Microsoft got the contract to supply DOS for the IBM-PC.
For important stuff, well yes, I do upgrade to new media often. For example, in 1964, I mowed two lawns for $0.50 each and bought The Beatles "Hard Day's Night/I Should Have Known Better" single (the yellow/orange spiral Capitol 45RPM one) for 78 cents. In 1969, I bought the Apple/Capital album version with the two songs. In 1978, I got the reissue on vinyl, and in 1988 the CD version came out. I borrowed it from the library and recorded it onto hi-fi Metal 90 minute cassette. In 1999, I downloaded the new CD ripper/MP3 program and made a 128KBPS digital file of the song pair. And last month, I found the 2009 re-release of the songs in stereo and used ExactAudioCopy program to make a 256KBPS copy.
In my humble opinion, not shared by the legal establishment, I bought a lifetime license to copy the songs for my personal use when I put the three quarters and three pennies on the counter back in 1964. In the ensuing decades, the media and reproduction cost has gone down incredibly. The $0.78 in 1964 dollars is about $5.00 today for two songs. The album was $3.90 in 1969 dollars, about $15 today for 11 songs. The 1979 reissue was about $6.50, about $15 today for 25 songs. The cassette was about $3 for about 30 songs. The 1999 blank CD was $2 for about 200 songs. And the DVD-ROM I used recently was $0.15 for about 1500 songs.
Progress in media storage, if not musical quality.
Save your stuff in a format that you can at least open and parse if the original program is no longer available in any way, shape or form. For a formatted Word document, I'd suggest RTF. For the Macromedia stuff mentioned earlier, I'd suggest WTF.
The original was in pretty bad shape, the location wasn't even identifiable, but I did my best churning out a nice reprint for:
http://msgboard.snopes.com/politics/graphics/birth.jpg
Oh, you mean computer stuff? I got nothing. It's faster to just recreate my work from scratch. As in they still look like chicken scratchings when I'm done with them.
While it may not exactly answer the question, I work for a public policy research center based in New York City and we get annual property level tax data from the city's Department of Finance. It comes on a cartridge in variable length ebcdic and we have to take the disk to the one remaining mainframe at NYU in order to get them to drop it on an ft server so that we can work with it.
I have an original copy of Tom Pittman's 6800 TINY BASIC on paper tape. I recovered it with my working SWTPC 6800 SS-50 machine from about 1975 using a home-brew paper tape reader I built long ago. It loaded and ran, so I popped it onto cassette tape using an SWTPC AC-30 interface (which is all this machine has for "mass storage", it only reads paper tape, can't write it), imported it to my Gimix 6809 SS-50 machine from the cassette tape, popped it onto DSDD floppy, then used an S9 format serial transfer utility I wrote (*nix style) to get it into my Mac Pro via a serial/USB interface. Both the 6809 and 6800 machines can send S9 serially as a feature of the system monitor (SBUG for the 6800 and GMXBUG for the Gimix), but I wanted a record of it on the 6809 for later reworking, hence the middleman.
I've got all my writing - personal letters, an article I published in Kilobaud magazine, that kind of thing - from the late 1970's that was done on the 6800 and the Gimix 6809, all of my 6800 programs, and everything I ever did on the 6809, as well as all the software - editors, assemblers, compilers, an early spreadsheet, arcade games, a bunch of ham radio stuff (baudot to ascii converters, morse code and radioteletype software, "log" programs, antenna calculators and so on.)
And while emulation may not count as a recovery tool for the purposes of TFS, I wrote a 6809/Flex emulation which boots PSYMON and then FLEX, that can read and deal with all of the 6809-era stuff in a native fashion... even has a graphics engine that runs some of the arcade stuff I wrote back when that was the place to work. I designed arcade hardware that used the 6809, and built an SS-50 board for my Gimix to make design easier, and when I did the emulation, well, hadda have that there as well. :)
So that's 1975 data to 2010 hardware, about 35 years of recovery span. With the emulator, that recovery will extend for quite some time, basically as long as anything can run XP, real or virtual (which is where my emulator lives.)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
"If so, please share the interesting 'hows,'"
Procedure: I just now put the badly scratched CD burned on 12/14/1998 in my optical drive and successfully unpacked the Fallout 2 directory I had RARed as a backup.
If it's mission critical, make several copies and store them in different locations.
This was a consumer CD, by the way, which means it was also the cheapest consumer CD I could buy at the time. I've never had problems with any of my old CDs unless they get scratched severely or left under UV.
it works but hums a bit i backed up recently all the stuff i wanted and i dont use it often and its stored properly.
Nuking from orbit is prohibited by the Eridani Edict. Sure as hell don't want Battle fleet on my ass. Points for the reference without Googling.
I have tapes I cut on a TTY machine for dozens of small engineering programs waaay back in 1979 in Basic & Fortran. I was cleaning up and found some of those rolls of paper tape that still look as good as new. I still have the Basic & Fortran printouts on paper for most of them, so my recovery process is "visual".
I recall that if you were used to reading those tapes you could do it visually, but I've obviously lost the memory of how to do it, but bet that in a pinch it could be done again.
I have a stack of them i keep around purely as a novelty. The data on them is perfectly readable despite the fact that i don't have a computer or punch card reader. I just have to look at them.
Backups are for the weak.
Keep the data on a RAID5 array with 8 2TB cheap-o SATA drives.
Thanks to the RAID5, if a hard drive fails, no data is lost, so there's nothing to worry about.
Use a NTFS volume with volume shadow copy turned on keeping a few old versions of files, in case of accidental deletion/revision.
If someone deletes an important piece of data and doesn't notice it within a few days, that is their problem.
Nothing to worry about, right?
Folks who keep 10 years of backups around are nuts. Do you even have any idea what is in those 10 year old backup tapes? If it's not on the computer, your company's not making efficient use of the stored info
If the file doesn't exist and hasn't been noticed within a short time, then it really is not important.
I want to post.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Medical data from "60"s on punch tape (punch tape reader was being retired) transfered to mylar tape. Mylar tape machine data then dumped to pc hard drive via telenet over rs232 connection and subsequently 8mm tapes via scsi-2 tape deck circa 1997.
Then transformed the "data dump" from IBCIDIC to "sane" utf-8 asci.
I was thinking of the fig-FORTH I hand-loaded onto my micro-chroma 6800 prototyping kit back in '81. Im not sure I can still read the tapes, but I can get the listing off the web and type it back in by hand, which is the same way I loaded it in the first place.
I still have TRS80 Color Computer Color Basic files I saved to tape around '86, but that's a different thread, I think.
Anyway, Apollo and the phonautograms ediron mentions beat what I've got, hands down.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
I recently recovered my grandmother's IBM XT data. She had hundreds of WordPerfect and Personal Ancestry files -- all on an MFM 4MB hard disk. I was able to get the image off after booting it up with an old monitor, and I made a DosBox image for it so that my dad/aunt/uncles could double-click and run all her stuff. My father was upset because I sent the link out to everyone before he had a chance to go through it for "personal" data that he would then presumably keep from everyone else. I doubt she cares, though.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
If you really want access to data forever, "leak" it to rapidshare, youtube, 4chan, or something similar and then post to your facebook that you don't want people to find it. 30 years from now, just google it as you need it.
The simplest was a restore of a file from the backups of an old Sun SparcStation IPX (still extant, but non-booting at the moment). This was straightforward: dig out the SSI QIC drive, plug it into the SCSI port on my Ubuntu box, load the tape, and type the tar command.
More tedious but no more difficult was restoring a program written in BASIC on my first pocket machine, a 1982 Sharp PC-1500 (now donated to Bruce Damer's DigiBarn museum). This backed up onto a micro audio cassette on a Dictaphone-style Radio Shack handheld recorder. In 1998 or thereabouts I wanted the implementation of Logo I had written for the kids, so I dug out the machine, cleaned it up, and it stayed dead. I had to resurrect the system unit from a clone on Ebay before I could get it to boot; but then loading the file from tape worked fine, and dialing up via the RS-232 port modem at 2400 baud to my VAX and sending the file via Kermit went just fine.
Nothing on them I want, which is good. I just kept them for souvenirs. But yes, they have my data on it.
/opens vault door to his underground bunker
Wait a second... the "non-event Y2k"? Is it safe to come out now?
I was in the last engineering class at the University of Alabama to have to use punch cards for the intro to fortran class. I still have all the programs I wrote for that class in a shoebox. I pulled them out about a year ago for a friend to show him how to deal with a rounding error he was getting in something he was doing. It might be a pain but you can still read the cards especially where i wrote the actual text on each one so you dont have to try and translate the holes. I started doing that and numbering them the first time i dropped the stack and it took forever to rebuild it. Anway the oldest file I have is from September 1984 and it is still readable in the original format today.
If that were real, there would be companies offering it as a service. Where are they?
I regularly had to access the 1916 paper archives of a university newspaper. Does that count?
Every year I read in about a dozen tapes worth of data from around 1982 in the geophysical SEGD format, and it all goes smoothly. How is that for an argument for well documented open standards? ...".
The tapes were originally only recorded for transport but for some reasons the clients lost the original and all backups. That's why I have a pile of 1980s media that has not been transcribed - it is supposed to be somebody else's data and somebody else's problem. If I decided to put 10,000+ reels onto more modern media it's likely that 98% has already been archived properly somewhere else - it's just every year I find a bit more of that other 2% when a client rings up and says "do you still have a tape of
I get the impression that this is not unusual in geophysics for several reasons. First, we have fast computers now so it doesn't cost much to look at existing geophysical data and extract more detail than was typically done in the 1980s and 1990s. Second, going out and collecting the data again is a multimillion dollar exercise with a lot of people and vehicles tramping over a lot of land that people are reluctant to allow access to, especially old farmers that have been through it all before. Third, where that data exists few people actually do what they should and shift their data to new media formats. We are very lucky that some of the old tape formats are robust (nine track, IBM3480, IBM3490 and then things just get better with most newer formats).
So to sum up, there are more people recovering data from the 1980s on a regular basis than most readers here would think. So much so that it would come down to - nothing special here just a normal days work, go look at the guy reading punch cards and give him points for effort.
I had to recover a series of essays from 5.25" floppy disks for someone, I basically transitioned through the years -- first an old PC clone with an 8088 that I had working (copied onto its hard drive), then I transferred it into an early-2000s Dell with a USB controller. I then copied the essays onto a flash drive for perusal (and printing off) from my current desktop. I don't remember how old they were, although they were from the mid to late 80s and were probably typed on an Apple II or early Macintosh, based on their use of carriage returns sans line feeds. They were plaintext, which was the saving grace -- I shudder to think of what the proprietary formats for older word processors might look like.
Yet Another Tech Blog
(but so much more, including game and movie reviews)
http://yanteb.peasantoid.org
I recently got motivated enough to restore files from my old 486... luckily, the drives were both 1gb (wow) SCSI-1 drives... I've got a Adaptec SCSI 160 controller in my file server... throw in a cable to convert to SCSI-1 centronics, and a cable from a CD tower (centronics to internal SCSI-1), and WinXP could read my old drives.
Nothing really notable (one was OS, other was misc data files)... but at least I could throw out the drives with confidence :)
Note: while I ignored the OS drive (after checking user data locations), the other drive *did* have some data corruption... nothing which bothered me, but worth noting given the topic.
I had couple of articles written between 1984 - 1987, all restored without any problems. Reason? They were written on paper, which shows that that's probably one of the longest-lasting and most transferable/restorable data storage media. http://www.caps-project.org/cache/DigitalMediaLifeExpectancyAndCare.html Then again, the access time, especially the random access time, is not really good. Anyway, I could restore them to harddisc easily and without any mistakes - I could actually fix some mistakes in the original file. Joking aside, I have an original NeXTcube OD and would like to restore some data from that, but I can't find a NeXTcube OD drive anymore... Any help?
Hmm. Let's see. I started writing code in, oh, 1970. I don't know about a file - but there's bound to be some punched cards left over in, let me think, FORTRAN I suppose. There must be a copy of my chess playing program from then (it was rubbish, but it DID work - and heck, I was only 15). Maybe in the back of a cupboard somewhere.
But to heck with files - what about actual running programs? The other day I visited an old customer of mine. And he was still running - all the time - a program written in Clipper to handle his auctioneer business. Yes, from 1985.
I reckon he got good value!
But I think the folk who wrote the programs for Voyager 1, launched in 1977, ought to claim that prize! Hats off to you, wherever you are.
"Cats like plain crisps"
I have reel-to-reel audio tapes from the 60s that still play on my tape deck from the 70s. I have digital backups, but I don't know if they will last the same 40-50 years that most of the original analog tapes have. My most recent "recovery" was a transfer to digital form about four years ago.
Some of the tapes have degraded and are not recoverable as the layer from one winding of tape has stuck to the adjacent winding.
My story might not be as elaborate as some others here, but it was quite a satisfying feeling of accomplishment at the time.
At work we have two old laptops running DOS 6.22. Both laptops are 486's with sub 100MB full height 2.5" hard disks. The only ports available were parallel and serial along with the old 16 bit PCMCIA card slot and a floppy drive. One laptop was hooked to an Allen Bradley 8400MP CNC controller on a Raytheon Nd:YAG production laser welding machine. The laptop was used to transfer CNC programs to and from the AB 8400 as it has very limited storage. Our laser welding engineer is an eccentric and impatient man. He frequently slammed the laptop when he became frustrated. Well one day that wound up breaking the floppy drive which was the only method of making backups. That day he needed to transfer a program that was stuck on the laptop and he was furious. Well I had the idea to yank the drive and use one of those ATA-USB drive adapters. For some reason the USB adapter did not work with that disk (no surprise seeing how old it was). So I had to take the second laptop apart and swap in the drive. Then I had to setup the cylinders, heads and sectors per track in the BIOS as the two disks were different (remember that?). I went online and searched for a DOS based serial file transfer program and found a nice free one (forget the name) an threw it on a floppy. I installed DOSBox on my XP based workstation, hooked a null modem cable from the laptop to the workstation and mapped a serial port in DOSBox. Using pkzip I zipped up all the data and transferred it to the PC running DOSBox which in turn was running the serial transfer software in listen mode.
So in essence I used one old laptop to fix another, old DOS file transfer software randomly found on the net and the open source DOSBox to bridge the DOS software to the XP machine. It took me little over an hour to do all that and saved the day for our crazy engineer. The second laptop was also backed up as it runs the DOS programming software for an old PLC we have to make adjustments to from time to time.
I have since retired the two laptops and now a more modern Dell running XP has DOSBox installed with all of the necessary software for the shop. A USB serial adapter takes care of the rest.
I recovered a whole bunch of txt files off a slew of 3½-inch floppy disk, from my old trusted Atari ST, using an P300 a few years back, totalling 3mb of rough drafts and references from a bunch of project.
Took a few hours while handling the disks gingerly.(15 years + storage here)
Why? Because I could.
I still have a stack of Pascal programs that I wrote on punch cards in 1979. Find me a card reader and an IBM 360, and I'll restore them. Fortunately, I have no need for old school projects.
I have a box full of 3.5" floppies much of which predates Y2K. I have a parallel port Zip drive as well, though I think I erased all of those discs after scavenging them recently.
Oldest thing I've had to restore was a DDS2 tape cartridge from 1994. I have a bunch of DDS2 tapes from that era, and I had saved a HP SureStore drive and SCSI card with the box of tapes for such an event. No problem getting the tapes to read, but the first thing I did was restore them all and backed them up to dual layer DVDs (which worked out well since tapes hold handy 8GB chunks).
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1916240&cid=34612834
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1916240&cid=34647708
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1922942&cid=34665368
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1924664&cid=34669668
Check out this fellow:
www.trachtman.org
He built on the efforts of two others to scan old player piano rolls and use software to re-constitute the information as MIDI files. If punch cards can be considered files, player piano rolls can too. He has scanned and converted almost 7000 such rolls.
The MIDI files can be printed out as sheet music on paper or backed up to the latest computer format going forward.
I am not sure when the vintage piano rolls were cut (that people have sent him), but player pianos have been around for decades, and a lot of the files on his site are U.S. public domain (before 1922) music. Check it out!
I'm one of a handful of people who have a 5.25" drive on their Windows 7 machine - Win7, like Vista, has a nice shiny 5.25" disk icon, unlike XP which reused the Windows 2000 icon.
My machine is a Core2 Duo box and I'll be replacing it with a new Core i5 (Sandy Bridge) build within a month. You can't buy standard FDD controller cards any more, so it looks like I'll be buying an ASRock motherboard - as their socket 1155 mottherboards are the only ones I've seen with a floppy connector still.
Although, I'm not sure it counts, since I just fire up the old NeXTStation and FTP it over. ;>
Does recovering Amiga files in ProWrite format from 3" floppies count? Yes, I said three inch, none-a this 'and-a-half' cruft here!
You did the RIGHT thing, and were rewarded accordingly! That is a very heartwarming story, and is in stark contrast to a story told me by a friend: He used to work as a manager in a local Radio Shack. A customer had come in, with a cordless phone that was broken. It was no longer in stock, but my friend found another, similar unit. Knowing this customer to be a local businessman, he just wrote it up as a "Promo" and gave the man the $19 (retail) phone for free. The man was very appreciative. Within days, he came back and ordered many hundreds of dollars worth of 2-way radio equipment for his business, as well as several new phones, etc.
In spite of the fact that this customer soon returned, and spent a significant amount of money, my friend's boss (District Manager) actually chewed him out for "giving away" that $19 phone! (Which only cost the company about $9!) The profit they made on the subsequent sale was irrelevant to this dolt, who insisted that my friend no longer "give away" merchandise.
My friend deserved accolades. Instead, he got his butt chewed. Needless to say, he quit soon after... QUITE disgusted.
Is it any wonder the people working in most Radio Shack stores are so clueless? Upper Management doesn't have a clue, and apparently doesn't want people smarter then they are working in their stores. Sad.
"You have questions, we have dolts."
Willie...
If that were real, there would be companies offering it as a service
We know that governments have reconstructed cross-shredded paper documents in the past; the fact that no company offers that as a service doesn't make it mythical. We know that NASA put people on the moon; the fact that no company offers trips to the moon as a current service doesn't mean it's not real. It just means it's too difficult and expensive to commercialize.
That something is feasible doesn't mean it's commercially viable. It requires fastidious efforts with a SFM or MFM electron microscope, and isn't likely to make a commercial appearance any time soon; at the same time, most governments won't allow declassification of any drive that had sensitive info on it even if it's overwritten many times (see the US government's guidelines on declassification of sensitive hardware for just one example).
rage, rage against the dying of the light
really messed my day up one time. They ran proprietary DOS software for a pizza business. One of the CR's died and I needed to figure out they ran DOS with a special version of NetWare which did not network the PCs through normal TCP/IP, but frames, and had to be configured just so to work
I re-built DOS from scratch on those PCs and the custom serial cash drawer shit worked like a champ. The owner of the pizza place was eternally grateful and paid me a nice hourly rate to re-build those old DOS boxes as well as free pizza and beer for a good long time.
Finally, COBOL was laid to rest after the scare of 1999. :)
A friend asked me to restore her PHD thesis that she had written in the late 80ies in Word 4.0 for MS-DOS).
She still had the files on 5 1/4" Floppies. I always keep one of these drives around, so the pure data steeam was not too much effort.
But Word 2000 (the oldes I had available) would not read these files. I asked some collegues and one of them still had a copy of MS-Works - do not recall which version.
That could read the Word 4.0 files. From there via another version of MS-Works to Word 2000 and now Word 2007.
What was most astonishing: all the footnotes and the table of content were perfectly preserved.
Key Learning #1: Whenever one changes technology or software - bring your data to the current media and data formats.
Key Learning #2: nothing beats ASCII: I can still read/edit my ASCII files that I did in 1977 on my KIM-1 (they transferred via RS-232 to my first PC)
When I worked as a data archivist about a dozen years ago, we routinely recovered data from oil seismic recordings. Some of the oldest recordings we recovered were made on 1" tape, originally recorded on TI tape drives (GSI TIAC machines). These spools weighed about 18lbs... don't drop em'.
For it's time it must have been fairly advanced, as the data was 8 channel, 8 bit sampling @ 100Hz...
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
in Scandinavia, 8" floppies were used all the way through the early 90s with a system that was used widely throughout the industry from Sweden. The original system was based on nearly all custom technology to the extent that it even contained a custom designed floppy controller based primarily on simple logic, opamps and passives as opposed to using a floppy controller chip (which might not have been highly available at the time).
The system was used all that time since equipment for real-time injection of subtitles were very hard to do without specialized equipment back then. After all, you wanted to pass through as much of the signal as possible without loss before applying the subtitles. Even now, most archives in TV networks are riddled with media that was destroyed (well, not destroyed, but severely degraded) by passing it through these subtitling systems.
Well, it ends up, that there were tens of thousands of programs subtitled using these systems and the only form of media storage was via 8" floppy discs using a custom format and using a file format that was damn near impossible to decipher.
By using extremely fine iron filings (more of a powder than filings per say) I powder the discs and then using a high resolution camera, I take multiple photographs of the disc, moving the camera each time. Then I overlay the images and line up the bits to produce a 100megapixel or higher image. Then using relatively simple threshold level techniques, I convert the images to monochrome. Then I identify the rings of the disc (they're nearly perfect, but there is a tiny variance which makes it so I identify them individually). Then I decurl them (make them linear) and then identify the bit streams.
Once they are turned into bits, create a bit file and then decode the media using a file converter I've written that also maps each decoded byte to the region of the image which the data was extracted from. This way, if the data appears wrong, it's possible to visually inspect the region of the image to identify if it was simply an issue of the powder not sticking where it should have.
I've also used this method for fragile IBM 370 and NCR tapes.
I've got a mac from circa 1991. Amazingly, the original Seagate 40MB (yes, that's megabyte!) hard drive still works fine - still verified with no bad disk sectors! If only other hard drives I've since purchased would last as long.
As I've upgraded over the years, I've copied the drive's contents to the next computer - so I still have files on my current computer that were made and never touched since on my Mac LC.
I keep the LC around to play some old games I like - such as Quest for Glory, Tetris Max, and Lunatic Fringe (part of an old After Dark screen saver - remember those?!!) etc... that just won't run on a current computer.
On the other hand I have seen plenty of 1.4MB floppy media turned corrupt with age. Most of them I've imaged so i have disk images for those important programs (mostly games). I'd have to say that the games are why I still keep it around. One thing I find funny is that they had a NES emulator for that system as well... and it actually worked. Amazing they managed to emulate a nes system with only 16MHz at their disposal. But it wasn't exactly frame exact emulation back then. And 68K assembly wherever they could get away with it to improve performance.
The problem is that there is no proof that what is in that paper can be made to hold for modern hard disk technology with vastly increased densities (SSDs and "secret" block remapping are another matter of course)... You can see a more aggressive complaint about recovery after zeroing on this old Slashdot story. This is one of those Slashdot arguments that keeps recurring though.
The point about going to the moon is that it is that we know about it - it's "just" expensive. Recovering data on modern disks after zeroing is either currently so hard to do as to be impractical for more than a few bytes or someone is doing a fantastic job of keeping it quiet.
The best way to recover files deleted that long ago from a hard drive is probably one of these three options:
1) Invent a time machine and travel back in time to when the file was on the hard drive (or at least deleted and not yet had the sectors written-over);
2) Go underground in the world of dark magicks to discover a sinister ritual involving virgin sacrifice to resurrect the long-dead files;
3) Use an Ouija board with simply "1" and "0" on it and reconstruct the file from the afterlife bit-by-bit.
These are the likeliest and easiest solutions to your problem. I wish you luck.
The challenge was not to recover data that was deleted, erased, overwritten, etc. The challenge is to recover data off old storage media. As in, the data was intact last time you looked at it, but can you retrieve it now or has "bitrot" consumed it utterly?
Also what is more secure as a destruction process, encrypt and forget or zero the drive?
Destruction is the most secure destruction process :-D
Depends on the encryption method - if it's ProtectDrive how valuable is the data to you? I *can* unencrypt that. Over-writing isn't very effective - it's mandated in various environments as an interim measure prior to smelting.
Last year I had someone come to me wanting the photos, music, logins and passwords recovered from a recent model Toshiba laptop running Vistass. He'd reformatted the drive and intalled a stock Vista Home over the original OEM install and recovery partitions. It took a week (big hdd) but the required data and the original OEM recovery partition (with all it's data) was recovered.
I don't have anything that'd make it worth doing forensic recovery for (though old clients might disagree) - but dead drives go the scrap metal yard anyway. Getting data out of molten slag should be pretty hard...
You realize all this backup technology will be obsolote the instant we invent time travel, don't you?
Actually, services that recover physically damaged hard disk drives (including water and fire damage) are a dime a dozen. Physically smashing the drive would be slightly more effective than fire but twiddling ALL the bits to hell and back is the best way.
Yep. There's a company in Fyshwick (Australia) still recovering data off partially melted sections of platter from the Twin Towers - they use some pretty sophisticated software and a specialized side-scanning electron microscope.
I once managed to transfer some files off my Commodore 64 floppies. Wouldn't be able to do that now, because none of the computers at hand have obsolete printer ports to attach the 1541 interface cable to. And the computers understandably also don't run MS-DOS.
I also had a bunch of PC files from 1990s, which I was able to read (thanks to OpenOffice.org and nice WordPerfect filters available for it), though the formatting wasn't imported picture-perfectly. Some other word processing packages from that era just used plain text, which made imports even easier. The only problem generally was the IBM CP437 character set, which was very easy to convert to Latin-1 or UTF-8.
Image files have fared best: ImageMagick can handle tons of stuff. Though vector formats are a problem - it might not be, if only I had had the foresight to export images to WMF/CGM, which are *a little bit* more readable these days. Probably no luck reading the odd files made with Arts & Letters Composer on Windows 3.0...
#3 seems to be a winner
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
+2 Troll is Slashdot's way of saying groupthink is confused
Normal OS commands don't enable you to overwrite a file; when you save a file, it might be written over the old one, or somewhere else on the disk (even though it still has the same filename), in which case the old version could still be recovered.
That failing is specific to Windoof, and I'm not certain that Windoof 7 (or Vistass) do that anymore (could be only the old FAT file systems did that).
But once that physical block is overwritten, the previous data is gone. Assertions to the contrary are nothing but urban legend and speculation. Nobody seems comfortable claiming that one pass with zeroes is sufficient, but I've seen no evidence that it isn't.
Wrong. You need to get out from under that rock.
Hint: 4chan are playing with you, and, "del. > nul" won't get you that free upgrade either...
The field strength of the heads, and the ability of the platters to retain magnetic fields is reduced over time. Also the tracking is modified. Those factors make Scalpel possible. Data density don't mean shit - if it can be written it can be read. Where Scalpel techniques don't work - head re-positioning and re-reads are used, when they don't work a specialized side-scanning electron microscope is used. When those methods fail it's because there is no data. Regardless of the number of overwrites traces of earlier writes remain - the ability to recover and reconstruct various layers is determined by the sophistication of the software used. If theirs data there it can be recovered - converting it into information is another matter.
The information (citations) is out there - Google is your friend.
Pixar re-rendered Toy Story in 3D, a task which involved opening 15 year old files from systems still in development.
From http://www.awn.com/articles/reviews/pixar-goes-3-d/page/2,1
Well I had to restore my resume (CV) during the year. I recollected it was sitting on my old NetApp F630 (SCSI, 9GB drives) from c. 1998. She had been in the garage for some time. So recabled her ... powered her up and uh-oh ... boot failure. NVRAM batteries dead. Went down to the local electronics store and purchased a couple of button batteries. Replaced them then powered her up upon which DataOnTap told me it had been offline for 7 years 11 months. Checked the exports ... all good and pulled off the data on there. Interesting thing was that whilst poking around in the archives ... I found a bunch of assembler I had written for an Epson QX-10 (c. 1983) plus BBS based freeware I wrote in 1985. The file that took the cake though was a bunch of assembler that I copied out of magazine for a game for a TRS-80 ... spent hours keying that into a Pencil II and wondered why it didn't work ...
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=136
I still have a number of pre-DOS BASIC programs created in '82 or '83 on a Dick Smith Model 80 (TRS 80 clone) in a very primitive BASIC - had to transfer them via RS-232 to a fast (8 MB/s) XT clone as it couldn't read the 45K SSSD 5 1/4" floppies. I have installed my old 5 1/4" drive and copied them to my current system from 360 KB and 1.2 MB floppies, together with a copy of GWBASIC and was able to run them. It's been a long way from when there were micro-computers with no HDD's and the BASIC interpreter, the program and the data all had to fit on a 45K floppy and run in 16K of RAM. This was done at work and the Energy Consumption and Product Loss programs I wrote saved something on the order of $100,000 in the first year, not bad for a system which cost $2000 - about three times what my current system cost. I also have a rotary calciner model created in FORTRAN on an ICL 1900 in the mid-70's, migrated to a WANG VS-65, then later migrated (I forget how) to compile in MS-FORTRAN on a '286 (one of those horrible IBM Microchannel things). Must have a couple of hundred 5 1/4" floppies and a similar number of 3 /12" stiffies which have sat in my cabinet for about 20 years - all still readable (I hope).
Assembler source files for demos I wrote from about 89-93. Found my old 120MB disk in the closet, mounted it in a PC, accessed it from WinUAE and copied over the files.
Can I light a sig ?
Used Linux TRS-80 emulator to read a 5.25" diskette containing a VisiCalc file for a customer. A quick python script later the file was loaded into Excel and running.
Manuscripts don't burn!
Are we talking about a file that we have copied to a different media? ex. a copy of a file on a floppy disk Or is the question what is the oldest file that can be restored? Where restored means the file was somehow processed to a different format and/or media. ex. Using the DOS backup and restore commands. Its a reasonable question becuase I have files that can be direct copied from removable media as far back and 1979. But it its pain in the neck to get old programs to unlock the compressed/encrypted data files and get them back to their original state.
.... and lived happily ever after.
I just felt it need an ending.. this one or the classic: "ah now I can watch tv for the rest of eternity *eyglasses break* no.. noo... WHYYYYYYY!"
Pick the one you like.
The oldest "files" that I can restore from the original media are IBM1800 FORTRAN programs stored on 80 column punched cards and PDP-11 code on paper tape. They date from 1974.
I would have some older punched card archives but my mom found them and (thinking they were waste) used them to write shopping lists on (after I had moved out but before I had a permanent place of my own to store my stuff in).
No over written data has ever been restored. PERIOD. One pass and and its gone forever. Period.
Please, if you are going to respond to this saying you can, google the subject and some to an understanding of it first.
Um, this caps filter is complete bullshit. The entire line above was to be in caps, because I was yelling it.
Um, no, never. Sorry.
Few year ago I found a single ZX Spectrum tape, ca. 1985, with some BASIC programs which I had typed and stored. :)
:(
By simply connecting a tape recorder to the sound card on my PC, recording the data, running a few filters, finding/running a program to convert the audio to digital data, then converting the digital bits to ASCII....
I found a BASIC program, probably just copied from a magazine, which would play some piece of music. There were a few "spelling errors" caused either by cassette-tape degradation or digital->audio conversion error.
I hadn't gotten around to finding Spectrum emulator to play the music.... there's nothing quite like music played with BEEP and CLICK commands
All this data had been saved on a 3.5" PC floppy, which I threw away last week in a major clean-up
My oldest files are circa 1988 and were in Wordstar format. For those too young to remember Wordstar, it's native file format had the high bit set on the last letter of each word as an aid in deciding were extra spaces could be placed during print formatting. In order to use these files I had to write a small Visual BASIC program to parse the files and reset the high bits. The result is a plain text file, but still containing all of the 'dot' controls, (used for page breaks, font size, etc.). These files can be opened in a generic text editor and copy/pasted into a modern word processor for futher formatting/editing. BTW: Anybody need some ancient hard drives? The really 'big' ones I have are between 320M and 750M!
Back when I was in 6th grade, I wrote a program that was similar to a basic word processor. It took me 300 lines of TI Basic, it had simple drawing abilities, placed characters on the screen as like a type writer wrote (character, pause, pause character...), purposely slowly and methodically and occasionally with sound effects and stores the data file information as Hex. Much of the code was purposely Spaghetti Code as it had a cute Easter Egg that I only wanted access in certain situations. I wrote that in 1981, Last year (early part of 2010) I pulled it off of a 5.25 floppy, using Linux as a text file then converted the stored info to recreated the original program & one of the sets of the data files. I was elated to see the hours of work and research I put into it back then and to remember how I retrieved the Easter Egg. I tried to get it to run on a TI99/4a emulator with out much luck. Perhaps one day I will.
I lost all my old C64 floppys when my parents moved to a new house. Felt a bit sad that every demo I ever made was gone.
Luckily I found them again when googling my own name! Turned out that someone I have never met had the time and devotion to find them, transfer them to a PC, read every scroll text and attribute every part to the correct person. They even found my real name, and my old address and phone number by dumping the memory at $3000. :-)
An important note here is that I am not a well known scener, nor was my group, and the demos were not very technically advanced or pretty. But if something ends up on the internet it seems like it will never go away.
Back in the early days of CD-Rs, I used a Win95 backup app which wrote directly to a CD-R in some sort of tape-ish custom backup format. Many years later I tried to recover the backup. Of course the proprietary format was unreadable by normal tools. Fortunately I still had the original install disks for the backup app so I tried installing it under XP. I think I had to use the Win95 compatibility mode to even get it installed. And even after it installed it wouldn't run. Fortunately, I still had an old ThinkPad lying around which I could install Win95 on. And even then, the @#%$ app refused to try to restore the backup using the built-in CD-ROM drive! Again, I went back to the basement and dragged out an external, parallel port, CD-RW drive. With that loaded up I was able to pull the files off the backup, then make a new CD-R backup in standard format.
Backups should always be readable without the program used to make the backup. Otherwise they are just as useful as an encrypted backup for which you've forgotten the key. (Been there, done that too.)
I still have some files from 1973 of BASIC programs that I wrote on punched tape. They seemed "fine" the last time I looked (within a couple of years). I'm sure I could scan them and OCR them if I had to, and I still have access to a teletype if I really wanted it (though I'd have to make a current-loop to RS-232 converter). HOWEVER -- you can just look at the tape and copy the data, if you REALLY need to. Tedious, but possible...
-- My brain is just a BUNDLE of nerves...!
Funny you should ask. Scientific data from the early dawn of home computers. Okay, so it was really the late 70s. Data that was recorded by an Apple ][, not an Apple ][+ or any other extension. It was for my dad, stuff in the Physics world had churned and the ancient data (generated by a now dead post-doc) was of interest. So I called my friends with old gear. It was a several step manual process that involved several ancient Apples ][s, Proto-Macintosh systems, and finally an Macintosh laptop that had both a 3.5" drive and a USB stick. I was much more successful than my dad thought I would be, his geeky son tends to be who he turns to when all others fail him, and he complains about not being able to do something with computers to my mom, and she makes him call me! :-)
The outcome has been somewhere between 3 and 7 published papers. All off of work that seemed to be dead end at the time.
It was sort of interesting seeing just how little space was taken up by the boxes of old Apple ][ disks when copied to a modern flash drive.
WordPerfect file from an Apple IIe. Used a ProTerm on the Apple IIe, and null-modem serial cable to a Mac with a Keyspan USB->Serial adaptor. Worked great.
>Running the drive through a fine grinding machine or melting it down completely, are two very secure
>methods.
That's what we do. The shredder is very low-tech and frighteningly specific. It's wasteful but this is a defense plant.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
It is your word against mine. One of us is going to have to provide a citation. Let me ask google.
http://www.forensicswiki.org/wiki/Remnant_Data
Well, it works on floppy disks. So that supports my account: That this technique was once viable, long ago, on drives of very low bit density compared to todays. It is viable no longer.
Yes, it's a wiki. But it links to an actual paper if you want to research further.
http://computer-forensics.sans.org/blog/2009/02/04/what-happens-when-you-overwrite-data/
That paper is garbage. I've seen it referenced before only when used to debunk this idea. Wish could find those threads.
Call a data recovery place and ask. They will say they the over written data will not be recovered, but they will see what they can do if you are in a position where the attempt much be made.
This method of copying the previous generation of storage up to each new upgrade has led me to a series of recursively nested backups, because every time I upgrade the new hard disk has enough capacity to copy the entire previous hard disk into a small backup folder. So my current /backups/ folder has /backups/from2008Laptop which in turn has /backups/from2005PC which in turn has /backups/from2001-10GB which in turn has /backups/from1998-520MB etc. Somewhere in there are images from 5.25" install disks that I haven't needed in 20 years, but I'm afraid to delete and thus forever lose any ties to old work.
Which brings me back to OP's question: The best I can manage is a dusty old 5.25" floppy drive that, in theory, I could hook up and retrieve files from 1985-1995, but I doubt the diskettes themselves are still any good.
Yeah, the stuff from the '60s, if it wasn't migrated and kept up - that's a challenge, but any competent (and competently-managed) solution has at least one extra copy of everything it's got backed up, and keeps up with moving the data from the least-recently-accessed volumes so they never get a chance to rot - independently of media. I'm sure lots of the lesser solutions, like backup exec, commvault, legato, etc. can do it by now, in case you can't drive TSM.
it has been almost three decades of data preservation and backup -- still have files from a 1979 TRS-80 with 5.25" floppies - which were migrated over RS-232 serial cable to a 1984 Mac 128 onto 3.5" 400k floppies. from there, it was Mac Plus > Quadra 700 > Powerbook 540c > iMac 1998 > iBook 2001 > iMac G5 2003 > MacBook Pro 2009.
data is ephemeral -- without the active participation of a person that has a persistent multi-decade interest in retaining the data - it will fade away. it has only been obsessive data habits that have got them this far.
I've been involved in a kind of hacky system to record the orientation of the geomagnetic field in specific places using fluid-based granular deposition. Given the right conditions you get a nice, long, highly detailed record of geomagnetic orientation, and even intensity under some circumstances. Similar systems exist for making these recordings in subaerial environments (the Chinese have an extensive one, which for some reason they call Loess), as well as recording in assemblages of crystals formed from extrusive melts.
It's kind of a pain to recover the data and put it into a usable format - you've got to use a really precise magnetometer to measure the orientation of the bulk magnetic material in the recovered column (actually, you measure magnetic flux using SQUIDs in each of three component directions and then process these directions to determine the combined direction/intensity at a given horizon), and really you need to use one of several progressive demagnetization techniques to remove newer overprinting and recover the true orientation data. The oldest archives I've personally recovered go back about 500k years, although tens and hundreds of millions of years are possible and published, though these records are usually pretty spotty.
Does that count?
Yes, you and the 999 programmers in that group of thousands people who, scattered around the world, managed to fix the ~500 different computer based system, which were both extremely critical and used the kind of programming short-cuts which wouldn't live past 2000 : all of you were true heroes...
BUT
meanwhile marketing department everywhere went bat shit crazy, using the sheeple's fear to sell gazillons of upgrades, and putting "Y2K-compliant" stickers on anything just to increase its price (and by anything, I mean even VCR).
All the while, journalist needing some shocking title to sell advertising space, where churning articles about complete end of the world as we know it with "Mad-Max 3"-post apocalyptic results.
All the nuclear reactor around the world were supposed to blow up as a result of their controlling computers not being able to change to the new year.
And then 2000 came and went by. And nothing of notice happened. Because a few of the affected systems were fixed by people like you. Because of the not-fixed systems, none was really *that* critical (I mean, who gives a damn fuck if the ticket says 19100 instead of 2000 ?).
And mainly, because 99% of the things containing a CPU on this planet weren't affected. (either because they are slightly less dinosaurian, and keep time in non-affected formats (like unix epoch) or because they don't keep time to begin with). And most of the top critical infrastructures are though to be able to handle computer (or even power) outage. (An average hospital should be able to still admits emergency patients even if the network is down).
The world didn't end because your toaster didn't have a Y2K sticker on it.
From that point of view Y2K was a non event: it didn't live up the hype, because it was completely overblown out of proportion by the media.
You and your peers worked a lot and worked well. And thus saved some significant bucks to some enterprises still relying on these dying dinosaurs.
But the rest of the world could pretty much have ignored it, and then only read a glorifying article "The programmers who saved a few enterprises against 2000!".
But that didn't happen. The journalists desperately needed catchy subject to sell eyeballs to the advertisers, the marketeers decided to ride the scare to sell more product and force an upgrade cycle. And that scary Y2K never happened (and never could happen in the first place).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
While some of the heroic recovery methods for getting data off old media, old drives, etc are impressive, it seems that the data is largely in a fairly straightforward format once it's pulled from the media -- ASCII or some other "native" format that is fairly straightforward to work with.
But what about binary data from old applications that only run on old operating systems that only support older hardware?
The example I think of is what we used to run into at my old job. Email for us started out as ccMail in the early 90s, switched to Groupwise 4.x, then Groupwise 5.x and from there to Exchange 2000. IIRC, ccMail didn't require any kind of database back end, it was all file sharing, but Groupwise 4.x and later 5.x were very database oriented and encrypted and 5.x was run without any filesharing. 5.x ran on Netware 4.1, and once we had migrated off of it totally by 2001 we had no systems running it, a stack of Arcserve backup DAT & DLT IV tapes with Netware compressed files written to them that were almost totally useless.
After the economy sank in 2002, we had a ton of layoffs and not a few employment lawsuits requesting emails from the Groupwise era which we could not satisfy. We still had the DLT drives, but the media was unreadable and even if it was, the data on the media wasn't usable unless restored with Arcserve for Netware to a Netware volume that supported compression, and even then there was no accessing the email itself without a functional Groupwise system running on Netware.
Probably a more trivial application via virtualization now, provided you have the media, licenses and know-how still, but I have to believe that there are many situations like this where you need to restore entire systems to get access to data.
We used an HP2000 Time Shared BASIC minicomputer in high school. This computer was decommissioned in 1980. Many hobbyists use SIMH to reinvigorate these legacy OSes.
I was given a binary file copy of the final archive tape by the guy who decommissioned the system and was able to restore and boot up the original operating environment from 1980. I found a couple of programs I had written and some that friends of my brother had done.
Now I can play $BLJACK in a telnet session on my restored Teletype M35...
Ask Me About... The 80's!
I realized that before I hit "submit," but I thought my post was too amusing to let go. :)
I once was using an OSX machine to access archives of data and apps to install on a (networked) SE-30 I had to play with, which I thought might be useful as a print server and telephony machine ... strange as it seems, back in '95 or so I had a perfectly working, eminently useful, telephone answering/archiving/recording app with an app called Megaphone. One of the strange quirks of the modern computer era is every telephony app that came after it was crappy in comparison, and it won't run on an OS9 machine at all. I actually missed that app and I knew it would run fine on the SE-30 and System7.
Anyway, this involves going through floppies, zip drives and archives on HD for software to get the SE-30 working. At one point I double-click a file to see what it is ... and it's an application. For System 6. It launches on the OSX machine, and works perfectly, opening a database that I had created on a Mac Plus which was a kind of home inventory. All the data was there and it was pretty fun to poke through it.
Weren't you clowns working in 1985? Even if I wanted to, I couldn't restore anything I put on cd's from the 90's, because the dyes in the recording surfaces have deteriorated. But wottheheck, information entropy is a kind of built-in statute of limitations on stupidity, so rah say I. Rah. Rah.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
From a circa '94 486SX laptop with a 250MB hard drive . The drive had been compressed with Microsoft's DoubleSpace (remember Stacker?). Pulled the drive, connected to a USB to IDE/SATA controller, and it appears as a 2.2TB unpartitioned drive. This seems to be a CHS to LBA problem. Okay, get a 40-pin 3.5 inch to 44-pin 2.5 inch IDE adapter, connect to an older (circa 2000) internal IDE controller. Drive refuses to share the IDE channel with a slave. No problem, give it it's own channel. Ah, there it is, and there is the dblspace.000 file that I need to get into. Linux support for DriveSpace/DoubleSpace? Not in any modern kernels. Path of least resistance was to find a copy of Windows 95 and install on another old disk, which would only come up in safe mode on the relatively modern box I was doing all this on (Windows Protection Error), fire up the DriveSpace utility, and finally, voila! Most amusing recovered file was an email sent to my sister from Prague, where I had email-only dial up access (no port 80 for you!) explaining how to install and use Internet Explorer 2.0 so she could fill out a web form for me.
I still have floppies form '83 that I could restore from. I'd have to dig a 5.25" drive out of box in the basement before I could actually restore those files but it could be done.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
We few by John Ringo? Or something from David Drakes Honorverse.
Substitute original/witty tagline of your choice here.
I still have a VIC-20 and tape drive. Recently while listening to my cassette copy of the 1812 Overture, I realized that for some reason, when I was a kid, I had saved a BASIC program in the blank space occurring after the music on one side of the tape. I haven't tried to restore it, but the tape is in good shape, and there doesn't seem to be anything preventing reloading the program from tape. I'm guessing it dates from 1984. I have a lot of floppies from the late 80s that I'm sure are still readable, if I can find a working drive.
12:50 - press return.
Just get a gun and make a hole in the god damn disk. Problem solved.
First, I seriously doubt that the Almighty would damn the thing.
Second, you would only destroy a PORTION of the data. With the gear that the FBI has, they could still reconstruct significant portions of it from the undamaged parts of the disk... if they had a reason to do so.
Willie...
Yeah, it is wasteful... but depending upon what was on those drives, it's the only SURE way to prevent sensitive data from falling into the wrong hands. As long as the shreds are being recycled, that's a good thing. :)
Willie...
I have some datasets that date back to 1965 that I maintain and are still used and updated. Our Psychology Department does what they call longitudinal studies. They bring in a kid, age 2 or so, and give him/her some tests or make observations. They they track the kids and bring them back at ages like 5, 8, 12, 15, 18, 25, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, etc and retest them Then they analyze the data and discover things like if you suck your thumb at age 2 you're 29% more likely to become a lawyer. OK I made that one up, but you get the idea. The data was originally keyed in on punch cards submitted to an IBM mainframe running SAS for analysis. My predecessor transfered the data to 9 track tapes which were refreshed every few years. When our data center got rid of the mainframe and the last 9 track tape drive, we acquired the drive (a Kennedy) and bought a special interface card that allowed it to connect to an IBM PC ISA slot. The company that made the card had MSDOS software to control the tape drive and do EBCDIC to ASCII conversion. I put all the data onto 5 1/4 inch floppy disks with redundant copies. Later I considered moving it to CDRW, but read about limited lifetime of CDRW disks and decided not to. Instead I set up a Sun Sparcstation 5 file server and moved the data via ftp to spinning disk that was regularly monitored and backed up to QIC 40 tapes. I've upgraded and replaced that server 5 times, transferring the data via SCSI, ftp, and rsync. It's still online and will be after I retire. Data format has not been too much of a problem. It's plain text files, 7 bit ASCII, fixed column width. SAS still works with those. The hard part has been the metadata. Columns of numbers don't mean much if you don't know the column titles. That's was kept at first on paper, handed down to each investigator that took over the project. Some papers were lost so I persuaded them to write the schema in plain text files saved with the data.
EVERYTHING is analog media. You just need a proper-sized chisel. And a true Scotsman to wield it.
On the other hand, it would be rather difficult to store analog data on a CD or a hard drive.
Without a chisel, sharpie or some other hardware solution.
It might be somewhat easier to do that with a floppy - but again, you would need a specific (non standard) hardware solution for that. I.e. a proper-sized chisel.
Now... had you said Laser Disc - that would be somewhat more accurate, but not by much.
And just "storing" digital data isn't enough. It must also be digitally accessible and readable.
When you print out an MP3 as a continuous string of ones and zeroes - it is no longer a digital recording of data. It is now completely analog.
You have to digitize it in some way in order to be able to access the digital data which was converted into analog information.
At the same time, there is no such thing as random access (or write, delete, skip etc.) for ANY kind of tape media.
Again, you are converting digital data to analog information. It will remain analog until you re-digitize it.
While it is analog, you will be able to treat it like analog information - copy, access, delete it etc.
You can't really do that the other way around - unless you generalize "accessing data/information" as "looking at the hard drive" or something similar.
Or unless you get a proper sized chisel.
So, there is analog, and there is analog.
Tapes - analog. Hard drives and CDs - not really.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
It is not as much the brand, as it is general quality control during the production - reflected in the price of the media.
All those discs are from the time when a single CD was priced at about what an USB stick of a larger size than the CD cost now.
At the same time, I threw away hundreds of unreadable no-name, comes-on-a-spindle discs from the following decade.
Particularly the ones that were burned at maximum speeds by people who wouldn't bother to notice that they were shaving off about half a minute per disc at best - while using discs that were not really intended to be burned at such speeds.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
If anyone's curious, the setup I used to do this is pictured here:
http://www.mymorninglight.org.nyud.net/C64/index.htm
It's still set up, and still works. I haven't tinkered with it in a while, but last time I powered it up (2 months ago) it was working.
Willie...
The issue with not turning over disks that once held sensitive info is a check against nefarious employees (deliberately not erasing sensitive disks) or bureaucratic bungling (which box did the erased drives go in again?), not mad Russians with electron microscopes.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Only 10 years? Give me a break, come back when you're talking about real Dead Media like data tapes from NASA in the 60s or something.
My entire college career as a comp sci major fits on a 1.4MB floppy, with plenty of room to spare! That floppy is 15 years old, still chugging along last time I checked.
I recently recovered my very first data files (on 5 1/4" floppies from my high school days - programs I wrote myself plus software from that time) using an Apple IIe from a thrift store, a serial cable, and ADTPro on my Linux box. Now I can in theory run stuff on an emulator, although I didn't get around to it yet. The IIe is now for sale if anybody wants it (only reason being the impending move... otherwise I'd just keep it). tinyurl.com/2f684um
I recovered three diskettes from a Magnavox Videowriter using a standard 3 1/2" floppy drive. The disks themselves were apparently 360KB and I have no idea of the original file system. After trying a handful of utilities Teledisk did the trick. The raw dumps were saved to hard disk and I used another utility (forgot exactly which one) to strip out the non ASCII characters. The remaining text was occasionally out of proper order and also contained the spell check dictionaries, but after a bit of effort the files were reassembled.
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1916240&cid=34612834
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1916240&cid=34647708
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1922942&cid=34665368
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1924664&cid=34669668
ROTFLMAO!
I wouldn't listen to "professor hairyfeet" guys, as he's only an ITT Tech student.
At 10 years ago, it's probably on a ZIP disk, a floppy, or an old hard drive. In all cases the solution is the same: dig an old machine (all Macs) out of the attic, power it up and get it running (usually requires a boot CD as the PRAM battery is long dead), and copy the data off via an Ethernet network connection. This works up to 20 years, actually. Before that, the data might have been on a 5.25" floppy. However, I no longer have them so the problem is academic.
Data formats are generally not a problem; anything I've had to restore is all either text, Microsoft Word, or Microsoft Excel.
That has to be some of my grandfathers Lotus Symphony documents from ~1982 i had to get into Excel.. Symphony > AsEasyAs > Excel Import did the job.
Altho I'm making this comment a little late, I wanted to add this thought to what I posted a few days ago, about resurrecting my old Commodore 64 system. I also ran a BBS from about 1990 to about 1994. During that time, an older friend of mine established contact (thru my BBS) with a friend's Mom. (Either divorced or Widowed, I forget, now!) They eventually fell in love, and have been married ever since! All because of my little Commodore BBS. :)
Unfortunately, the storage space wasn't like today, so I had to set older postings to be deleted as new ones were made. Their early communications were lost to numerous re-writes. The last data was preserved, however, so I posted it online as a "snapshot" of my old BBS. You can see it here:
http://www.mymorninglight.org/C64/HoloDeck.htm
Willie...
There is something to be said about the Net never forgetting. This is the oldest file I can think of and it was originally uploaded amongst others to the crack section at WUArchive: http://www.gamers.org/pub/games/uwp-uml/romulus/cracks/dark-legions-crack.txt I am surprised it has survived this long.