Try converting all the Email to a PDF package. I have been adding to a pdf package for several years directly from outlook and also include any or all important attachments. You can sort or search at anytime using names, times, subjects, attachments or just about any other query parameter that you can think of. You can also secure the package and if higher security is desirable you can also save the secured package in an office one note notebook with a password which makes the file a little harder to crack. You can add to the package/archive anytime you wish or create multiple packages by week, month, year etc. and keep them in a large package. I believe cute pdf is free and works fairly well. I've had acroB pro for several years and that works great for a paid program. AcroB pro attaches to your Email client upon install so at anytime you can archive any or all emails with 2 or 3 clicks. Any pdf reader can be used on any system to read the email from a flash drive or cd or any portable media. I think you should be able to read the files 100 years from now since I don't see pdf's going away any time soon
(Is there any way to write data and then 10 years later get that same data back?)
Yes. I may be old school BUT when I started programming circa 1980ish (before the invention of the commercial hard drive) we backed up our data from punched cards to punched tape and sometimes magnetic tape. I have kept all of my origional programs in a safe environment and 100% of my data is just as readable and usable/executable as the day I created it. I would also bet that these programs/data will be 100% intact and usable/funtional 100+ years from now barring an act of GOD which can conceivably destroy anything.
VHS tapes that are 20 years old all seem to work well. I wonder if DVDs etc will behave in a similar fashion after 20 years.
Did you know that movies are all backed up/archived on film so they will be guaranteed to be available 100+ years from now.
There are no newer advanced electronic methods to guarantee data preservation at this time. Anything electronic can and will always fail at some point.
I have a few programs that I wrote on an old Olivetti system in high school which I backed up on punched tape and these backups still work the same as the day they were created with 100% of the data intact.
You are correct. A 1TB drive can ONLY hold 100 dvd's approx. I have been collecting movies for many years now and it would take over 100 - 1TB drives to hold the 10,000 + movie collection. By compressing with a quality codec to the specs I gave above, you will save 90 1TB drives without losing quality. Someday, if my wallet permits, I will have every movie ever made, provided I do not go bankrupt first. BluRay movies are compressed to start with but hold very high quality compressed with a good codec to approx. 2.5GBs. I might add that with Handbrake (free Open Souce via sourceForge), you may want to recode the dvd's a second time to a resolution/frame size/rate for your Iphone/crackberry etc. A great quality file will be approx. 50MB per 45 minutes of video. The only drawback is that this file type is not suitable to recode back to a dvd due to the severe compression. I recoded the entire 8 years of the series charmed (to mp4/m4v,.mov works good if only for apple) and fit all 200 est. episodes on an 8GB Iphone and they play in super hi quality. I am currently preparing all 9 years of Xfiles for my wifes Phone for Xmas.
For the audio, mp3's , like jpg's are lossy formats. They are named this because they lose quality/data with every copy. By their very nature of compression they discard most/over 80% of the data upon creating a lossy file. Wav's/flac's, camera raw or dng's are lossless and lose nothing regardless of how many copies are made because these file type do not use compession (for all practical purposes).
I had the same idea as the origional poster about 10 years ago and have finally found a reasonable method to work with audio/images/video.
If you only have 100 or so movies then size does not matter but if you have 10,000+ videos from dvd,HD, or BluRay, then you need a good system to start with.
Rosewill makes a great HD tower that can hold 8 HD's for a current max. of 8 2TB drives. (you can raid smaller drives anyway you wish) but widows can only handle arrays up to 2TB max. (so you cannot setup a raid-0 array with 2-2TB drives) if my memory serves me correctly. You only need an array/raid for backups or encoding. For storing files you are est using single non-arayed drives or at most, a raid-1 array for backup purposes only. This can potentially hold up to 20,000 movies for a media center. Now imagine choosing any of 20,000 movies and with 1 click,be watching it within 10-15 seconds.
I would recommend NTFS. I would also recommend that you get an open source program and compress the dvd's to approx. 700MB for up to 90 minutes and 1.4GB over 90 mins.
H264/ac3 or Xvid are good codecs to use. Batch schedule the movies and let the system compress all night when you don't need the system.
The reason for this is because dvd's take up a lot of wasted space because of the format. A compressed movie takes up far less space. I can store about 1000 movies on a 1TB drive
and if a dvd is ever needed, I can recode a dvd. There is not much quality difference between a compressed movie and a dvd file.
You can also convert the dvd's to.mov files but apple can read most H264 files or mp4 files. Many dvd players can read Xvid or Dvix files and others without the need for a dvd file.
For cd's, If you plan to burn several copies, then rip the cd's directly to.wav or.flac (lossless) files. mp3 files are like.jpg image files such that they lose a little quality/data each
time they are copied whereas lossless.wav or.flac files DO NOT regardless of how many times they are copied.
The best solution that I have found after long/painful research is to use ABBYY OCR software for OCR and conversions and then finish the file (if needed) with either Photoshop or your preferred Adobe application. ABBYY full version also includes the best screenshot reader I have ever used. The program can scan to ocr, an image file, a pdf, a word or exel document and a few others. If you captured the pages with a camera, you can flatten(optimize) the images in PS, Acrobat or InDesign if it is available for web which can take a huge file of images and compress them for web. This will create a very small file for your PDA. Keep in mind that if your objective is to create a tiny/flattened file for your PDA the pages will not be suitable for printing. For a PDA you can also reduce the files resolution quite a bit since a PDA usually only needs about 320x240 instead of 800x600 min. for a computer monitor. This is a huge tradeoff. A scan withh ABBYY can also correct the problem of page edges, dark spots etc because you choose the exact area to capture. I use a stoneage antique model Epson 2450 photo scanner to ABBYY or PS which works great for just about anything The best part about ABBYY software is that if you can see anything on your monitor, you can capture and convert it to anything you want. Program security cannot disable
The best solution that I have found after long/painful research is to use ABBYY OCR software for OCR and conversions
and then finish the file (if needed) with either Photoshop or your preferred Adobe application.
ABBYY full version also includes the best screenshot reader I have ever used.
The program can scan to ocr, an image file, a pdf, a word or exel document and a few others.
If you captured the pages with a camera, you can flatten(optimize) the images in PS, Acrobat or InDesign if it is available
for web which can take a huge file of images and compress them for web. This will create a very small file for your PDA.
Keep in mind that if your objective is to create a tiny/flattened file for your PDA the pages will not be suitable for printing.
For a PDA you can also reduce the files resolution quite a bit since a PDA usually only needs about 320x240 instead of 800x600 min. for a computer monitor.
This is a huge tradeoff.
A scan withh ABBYY can also correct the problem of page edges, dark spots etc because you choose the exact area to capture.
I use a stoneage antique model Epson 2450 photo scanner to ABBYY or PS which works great for just about anything
The best part about ABBYY software is that if you can see anything on your monitor, you can capture and convert it to anything you want.
Program security cannot disable it.
Slashdot Mirror
Try converting all the Email to a PDF package. I have been adding to a pdf package for several years directly from outlook and also include any or all important attachments. You can sort or search at anytime using names, times, subjects, attachments or just about any other query parameter that you can think of. You can also secure the package and if higher security is desirable you can also save the secured package in an office one note notebook with a password which makes the file a little harder to crack. You can add to the package/archive anytime you wish or create multiple packages by week, month, year etc. and keep them in a large package. I believe cute pdf is free and works fairly well. I've had acroB pro for several years and that works great for a paid program. AcroB pro attaches to your Email client upon install so at anytime you can archive any or all emails with 2 or 3 clicks. Any pdf reader can be used on any system to read the email from a flash drive or cd or any portable media. I think you should be able to read the files 100 years from now since I don't see pdf's going away any time soon
(Is there any way to write data and then 10 years later get that same data back?) Yes. I may be old school BUT when I started programming circa 1980ish (before the invention of the commercial hard drive) we backed up our data from punched cards to punched tape and sometimes magnetic tape. I have kept all of my origional programs in a safe environment and 100% of my data is just as readable and usable/executable as the day I created it. I would also bet that these programs/data will be 100% intact and usable/funtional 100+ years from now barring an act of GOD which can conceivably destroy anything. VHS tapes that are 20 years old all seem to work well. I wonder if DVDs etc will behave in a similar fashion after 20 years. Did you know that movies are all backed up/archived on film so they will be guaranteed to be available 100+ years from now. There are no newer advanced electronic methods to guarantee data preservation at this time. Anything electronic can and will always fail at some point. I have a few programs that I wrote on an old Olivetti system in high school which I backed up on punched tape and these backups still work the same as the day they were created with 100% of the data intact.
You are correct. A 1TB drive can ONLY hold 100 dvd's approx. I have been collecting movies for many years now and it would take over 100 - 1TB drives to hold the 10,000 + movie collection. By compressing with a quality codec to the specs I gave above, you will save 90 1TB drives without losing quality. Someday, if my wallet permits, I will have every movie ever made, provided I do not go bankrupt first. BluRay movies are compressed to start with but hold very high quality compressed with a good codec to approx. 2.5GBs. I might add that with Handbrake (free Open Souce via sourceForge), you may want to recode the dvd's a second time to a resolution/frame size/rate for your Iphone/crackberry etc. A great quality file will be approx. 50MB per 45 minutes of video. The only drawback is that this file type is not suitable to recode back to a dvd due to the severe compression. I recoded the entire 8 years of the series charmed (to mp4/m4v, .mov works good if only for apple) and fit all 200 est. episodes on an 8GB Iphone and they play in super hi quality. I am currently preparing all 9 years of Xfiles for my wifes Phone for Xmas.
For the audio, mp3's , like jpg's are lossy formats. They are named this because they lose quality/data with every copy. By their very nature of compression they discard most/over 80% of the data upon creating a lossy file. Wav's/flac's, camera raw or dng's are lossless and lose nothing regardless of how many copies are made because these file type do not use compession (for all practical purposes).
I had the same idea as the origional poster about 10 years ago and have finally found a reasonable method to work with audio/images/video.
If you only have 100 or so movies then size does not matter but if you have 10,000+ videos from dvd,HD, or BluRay, then you need a good system to start with.
Rosewill makes a great HD tower that can hold 8 HD's for a current max. of 8 2TB drives. (you can raid smaller drives anyway you wish) but widows can only handle arrays up to 2TB max. (so you cannot setup a raid-0 array with 2-2TB drives) if my memory serves me correctly. You only need an array/raid for backups or encoding. For storing files you are est using single non-arayed drives or at most, a raid-1 array for backup purposes only. This can potentially hold up to 20,000 movies for a media center. Now imagine choosing any of 20,000 movies and with 1 click,be watching it within 10-15 seconds.
I would recommend NTFS. I would also recommend that you get an open source program and compress the dvd's to approx. 700MB for up to 90 minutes and 1.4GB over 90 mins. H264/ac3 or Xvid are good codecs to use. Batch schedule the movies and let the system compress all night when you don't need the system. The reason for this is because dvd's take up a lot of wasted space because of the format. A compressed movie takes up far less space. I can store about 1000 movies on a 1TB drive and if a dvd is ever needed, I can recode a dvd. There is not much quality difference between a compressed movie and a dvd file. You can also convert the dvd's to .mov files but apple can read most H264 files or mp4 files. Many dvd players can read Xvid or Dvix files and others without the need for a dvd file.
For cd's, If you plan to burn several copies, then rip the cd's directly to .wav or .flac (lossless) files. mp3 files are like .jpg image files such that they lose a little quality/data each
time they are copied whereas lossless .wav or .flac files DO NOT regardless of how many times they are copied.
The best solution that I have found after long/painful research is to use ABBYY OCR software for OCR and conversions and then finish the file (if needed) with either Photoshop or your preferred Adobe application. ABBYY full version also includes the best screenshot reader I have ever used. The program can scan to ocr, an image file, a pdf, a word or exel document and a few others. If you captured the pages with a camera, you can flatten(optimize) the images in PS, Acrobat or InDesign if it is available for web which can take a huge file of images and compress them for web. This will create a very small file for your PDA. Keep in mind that if your objective is to create a tiny/flattened file for your PDA the pages will not be suitable for printing. For a PDA you can also reduce the files resolution quite a bit since a PDA usually only needs about 320x240 instead of 800x600 min. for a computer monitor. This is a huge tradeoff. A scan withh ABBYY can also correct the problem of page edges, dark spots etc because you choose the exact area to capture. I use a stoneage antique model Epson 2450 photo scanner to ABBYY or PS which works great for just about anything The best part about ABBYY software is that if you can see anything on your monitor, you can capture and convert it to anything you want. Program security cannot disable
The best solution that I have found after long/painful research is to use ABBYY OCR software for OCR and conversions and then finish the file (if needed) with either Photoshop or your preferred Adobe application. ABBYY full version also includes the best screenshot reader I have ever used. The program can scan to ocr, an image file, a pdf, a word or exel document and a few others. If you captured the pages with a camera, you can flatten(optimize) the images in PS, Acrobat or InDesign if it is available for web which can take a huge file of images and compress them for web. This will create a very small file for your PDA. Keep in mind that if your objective is to create a tiny/flattened file for your PDA the pages will not be suitable for printing. For a PDA you can also reduce the files resolution quite a bit since a PDA usually only needs about 320x240 instead of 800x600 min. for a computer monitor. This is a huge tradeoff. A scan withh ABBYY can also correct the problem of page edges, dark spots etc because you choose the exact area to capture. I use a stoneage antique model Epson 2450 photo scanner to ABBYY or PS which works great for just about anything The best part about ABBYY software is that if you can see anything on your monitor, you can capture and convert it to anything you want. Program security cannot disable it.