1970, freshman computer science student, large PDP-10 system which supported the entire university computing. Working on a program which could find deleted files again by picking up the traces still on the disk. If the newly freed blocks hadn't been overwritten yet, that is... Testing the program, accidently wiped out the MFD, Master File Directory. (Man, it's been a lot of years since the though "MFD" went thru my head! Ah, the fond memories!)
All files, many hundreds of students, several commercial operations, all gone in an instant! Entire system gone! RAN for the big red button. And yes, it actually was a big red button! Rebooted with no users, spent about 24 hours running the program. It took that long, it read each disk block sequentially with no buffering, wrote found files to tape, then restored from tape when all was done (so as not to wipe out files as it found files)! And I got all the files back!! Administration not too happy, but at least I proved the worth of my program!
I have just developed a Unix device, using Signetics' "Write Only Memory" chips, which not only collects unwanted bits, but also actually flushes them down the toilet. Simply "pipe" unwanted data to "\dev\toilet" eg:
> more foo.txt | toilet.
Also, for Mac & PC users, it comes with a more appropriate icon to replace the Trashcan icon - it's the new "Toilet" icon, and with it you can flush those no-longer-needed files down the drain!
We are currently in alpha test, and users should beware of one small problem currently being debugged: occasionally, when un-deleting a file (OS-X cmd-Z), the file comes back with a few extra bits of dark matter stuck to it which can stink up your system.
"Propose to an Englishman any principle, or any instrument, however admirable, and you will observe that the whole effort of the English mind is directed to find a difficulty, a defect, or an impossibility in it. If you speak to him of a machine for peeling a potato, he will pronounce it impossible; if you peel a potato with it before his eyes, he will declare it useless, because it will not slice a pineapple." -- Charles Babbage, 1852.
I have a HD specifically allocated for "stuff I plan on keeping forever". I limit it to one of: pdf, tiff, jpg, gif, html, wav, mp3, and plain txt files. The HD is FAT-32 formatted and reads and writes nicely both from my OS-X Mac and Windows-XP PC. On the mac I have a program (graphicConverter) which will, among other things, do batch converts. In a single command, I can convert *.xxx to *.yyy. For example, convert every single tiff on the hard drive to a pdf.
While it might be many days of crunching, it would seem that should some format be on its way out, or some new format prove itself to be the "way of the future", there will be programs to convert *.one to *.theOther. It might take a lot of cpu time, but that is not a big deal. (For example, I just recently converted 300+ GB of.wav files to circa 30 GB of poor quality MP3s (so that I could take my ENTIRE music library on vacation with me and not lug around the big hard drive, and this took about 4 days of background CPU time)!
Nevertheless, I cannot imagine there will not be a simple capability to convert *.one to *.theOther, on a giant scale if necessary.
This is not like the project I did a couple of years ago, where I converted my reel-to-reel tapes to digital format. That required a massive PHYSICAL effort, mounting reels, monitoring the conversion, etc. Once in digital format, converting to new formats, copying to new kinds of storage mediums, whatever I can imagine in the future, will now be as simple as dragging from one icon to another.
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1970, freshman computer science student, large PDP-10 system which supported the entire university computing. Working on a program which could find deleted files again by picking up the traces still on the disk. If the newly freed blocks hadn't been overwritten yet, that is... Testing the program, accidently wiped out the MFD, Master File Directory. (Man, it's been a lot of years since the though "MFD" went thru my head! Ah, the fond memories!) All files, many hundreds of students, several commercial operations, all gone in an instant! Entire system gone! RAN for the big red button. And yes, it actually was a big red button! Rebooted with no users, spent about 24 hours running the program. It took that long, it read each disk block sequentially with no buffering, wrote found files to tape, then restored from tape when all was done (so as not to wipe out files as it found files)! And I got all the files back!! Administration not too happy, but at least I proved the worth of my program!
I have just developed a Unix device, using Signetics' "Write Only Memory" chips, which not only collects unwanted bits, but also actually flushes them down the toilet. Simply "pipe" unwanted data to "\dev\toilet" eg: > more foo.txt | toilet. Also, for Mac & PC users, it comes with a more appropriate icon to replace the Trashcan icon - it's the new "Toilet" icon, and with it you can flush those no-longer-needed files down the drain! We are currently in alpha test, and users should beware of one small problem currently being debugged: occasionally, when un-deleting a file (OS-X cmd-Z), the file comes back with a few extra bits of dark matter stuck to it which can stink up your system.
"Propose to an Englishman any principle, or any instrument, however admirable, and you will observe that the whole effort of the English mind is directed to find a difficulty, a defect, or an impossibility in it. If you speak to him of a machine for peeling a potato, he will pronounce it impossible; if you peel a potato with it before his eyes, he will declare it useless, because it will not slice a pineapple." -- Charles Babbage, 1852.
I have a HD specifically allocated for "stuff I plan on keeping forever". I limit it to one of: pdf, tiff, jpg, gif, html, wav, mp3, and plain txt files. The HD is FAT-32 formatted and reads and writes nicely both from my OS-X Mac and Windows-XP PC. On the mac I have a program (graphicConverter) which will, among other things, do batch converts. In a single command, I can convert *.xxx to *.yyy. For example, convert every single tiff on the hard drive to a pdf.
.wav files to circa 30 GB of poor quality MP3s (so that I could take my ENTIRE music library on vacation with me and not lug around the big hard drive, and this took about 4 days of background CPU time)!
While it might be many days of crunching, it would seem that should some format be on its way out, or some new format prove itself to be the "way of the future", there will be programs to convert *.one to *.theOther. It might take a lot of cpu time, but that is not a big deal. (For example, I just recently converted 300+ GB of
Nevertheless, I cannot imagine there will not be a simple capability to convert *.one to *.theOther, on a giant scale if necessary.
This is not like the project I did a couple of years ago, where I converted my reel-to-reel tapes to digital format. That required a massive PHYSICAL effort, mounting reels, monitoring the conversion, etc. Once in digital format, converting to new formats, copying to new kinds of storage mediums, whatever I can imagine in the future, will now be as simple as dragging from one icon to another.
So why are we worried? Is this just FUD?