Quote:
Originally Posted by Greg Anos
Yes, digital information needs to be maintained. OTOH, maintenance is usually simple, if one does it in a timely manner. Most of the "horror stories" come from people/organizations who wouldn't bother to do that maintenance until the tech was so old that conversion methods had been scrapped. 8" floppy drive in 2022? Why hadn't they been converted decades ago to 5 1/4" floppies in the 1980's, and those to 3 1/2 (or hard drives) in the 1990's? (and those multiply backed up?) A days work both times.
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As to why the discs had never been converted? I did the majority of the conversion back in the early 90s to 3.5" floppies. This last set was missed then as it was sitting on the wrong shelf in the back of the corporate vault. When it was found during a move to a new office, I was contacted and asked if it was possible to do anything with them since their records showed me as having been paid for converting the original batch. I agreed to give it a try. See my previous message for how that worked out. Personally, I think I was over-paid but the customer was happy since I was a lot less expensive than a "professional" conversion outfit quoted. Probably the last time I will ever power on that box with the two Qume 8" drives but it was nice to find out that they still worked.
And BTW, it took more than a day's work the first time out. Those old floppies were fast compared to most of their contemporary storage media but slow by today's standards and the required conversion from EBCDIC to ASCII didn't help.