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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."
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.
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. ...
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
...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
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.
And on the other hand, I had a disc with a Sign Language dictionary. From just about 6 years ago. Problems? The videos were encoded with Intel Indeo. Surprise, Windows dropped support for this after XPSP1. After overcoming this problem, I wanted to use the movies without the program. So I had to find the file that linked between a word and its corresponding videos (which were, of course, numbered). Good luck figuring out it was made with Macromedia, getting the new Adobe Director, updating the file... and voila! No prob.
Let's see someone do that in 10 years.
Whenever in an argument, remember this.
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...
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.
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
Files you can restore? How about what's the youngest file you need that you can't restore?
I am not a sig.
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/
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.
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.
I just sent a 5.25" DSDD disk with system files from a 1982 Otrona Attache to someone else who noted I had the disks.
Grabbed the machine out of storage (took a while to figure out where I stuck it). Put the disk in and booted up. The horizontal sync on the Attache video is getting a bit wonky, but the disks and computer worked fine.
PIP A=B *.*
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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
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.
They do? SCSI cards cost what now? 50$ Which is nothing compared what they used to cost. I've got a truckload of PCI SCSI cards out of dumpsters. SCSI is wonderfully versatile. Attach the disk, the scanner, the optical drive or the tape drive and chances it will just work. Your chances are better with Linux than with Windows these days, but often it's just complaining from Windows. We have a SCSI Dia Scanner device, which used to turn up with a yellow triangle in the device manager on XP. Worked fine with the enclosed software, though. With Linux it works, but not with XSane... I have VueScan license (actually two, I have one, my dad has one). Works perfectly fine. Good software also for those unsupported scanners: Canon LiDE 20. No support on Mac OS X, but with VueScan... No problem. I'm getting offtopic though.
My experience is that SCSI disks will do just fine attached to a modern SCSI card and I still have my Iomega Jaz 1GB which works just fine.
The two PCMCIA SCSI cards I have though don't work well: not at all under Windows IIRC, and very badly under Linux.
Anyway: best I probably can do for "esoteric" is some Computer Architecture Projects I did back at the Uni on OS/2 Warp. Made on some IBM Office software that came with it. Those files are stored on one of the Jaz disks (Yes, the disks are still functional, I tested them a few months ago for kick 'n giggles when I found them back). Getting them from there is not hard (It's FAT32 after all), but reading the files might turn out problematic.
Second "hardest" is probably Wordperfect 5.1 files from even longer ago. I still have some letters I wrote with my teenage romance. Ah, memories... Those simply stayed in an archive folder that moved with me from computer to computer. They're zipped and I expect OpenOffice to open them just fine (or at least "readable").
Can't compete with those on esoteric material with weird filesystems on audio tapes and the like. I'm too young for that, even though I'm 34.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
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.
I've been wondering why you came to this site to begin with.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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 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
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 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.