Very interesting thread, thought about that quite often myself...
I have a nice antique collection of Apple II disks (with bits so large, 140kB/side, that most of them are still readable - have three Apples for hardware redundancy, too:)
Once I manage to back up all my old stuff to e.g. magneto optical drives, I'm quite confident that the data is safe, and I can rely on emulators to access the data. Nice.
However, I can't find the *time* to copy all the stuff from the Apple II to my Mac! Assuming 5 minutes per disk side, I have several days to spend, just for swapping floppies. No chance.
(OK, most of the stuff is available on the Web anyway, but I do have a lot of self written programs for the Apple II)
BTW, another aspect - most folks are talking about the data, but I'm also interested in the nostalgic games on the Apple II, no ASCII reader can help me there:) So emulation is crucial, too.
Same for my Atari ST stuff, the 3,5" disks are rotting on some shelf... at least I managed to copy the Atari's hard disks to MO (the Mac could fortunately read the Atari/PC SCSI partitions) and even got the *really* odd floptical 20MB disk data onto MO, but still...
Only to introduce still another topic: Records, not CDs. Hundreds of them to archive. However, they seem to last longer than magnetic media (oops, reminds me of my cassette tape collection!) - and no means of copying those quickly to digital media, 30-35 minutes per record side... Well, most of them are bound to exist somewhere as MP3s, so I should focus on really rare stuff or own recordings, hm? Time, need more time...
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Very interesting thread, thought about that quite often myself...
:)
:) So emulation is crucial, too.
I have a nice antique collection of Apple II disks (with bits so large, 140kB/side, that most of them are still readable - have three Apples for hardware redundancy, too
Once I manage to back up all my old stuff to e.g. magneto optical drives, I'm quite confident that the data is safe, and I can rely on emulators to access the data. Nice.
However, I can't find the *time* to copy all the stuff from the Apple II to my Mac! Assuming 5 minutes per disk side, I have several days to spend, just for swapping floppies. No chance.
(OK, most of the stuff is available on the Web anyway, but I do have a lot of self written programs for the Apple II)
BTW, another aspect - most folks are talking about the data, but I'm also interested in the nostalgic games on the Apple II, no ASCII reader can help me there
Same for my Atari ST stuff, the 3,5" disks are rotting on some shelf... at least I managed to copy the Atari's hard disks to MO (the Mac could fortunately read the Atari/PC SCSI partitions) and even got the *really* odd floptical 20MB disk data onto MO, but still...
Only to introduce still another topic: Records, not CDs. Hundreds of them to archive. However, they seem to last longer than magnetic media (oops, reminds me of my cassette tape collection!) - and no means of copying those quickly to digital media, 30-35 minutes per record side... Well, most of them are bound to exist somewhere as MP3s, so I should focus on really rare stuff or own recordings, hm? Time, need more time...