[AT] Backing up tractor pictures and degenerating into a ramble.

[Larry D. Goss]

I have a good friend who helped design the facilities for a major hard
drive manufacturer.  In discussing archiving with him he made the flat
statement that if something is stored magnetically, it is not archived.

I just shuffled about a dozen boxes of 3.5-inch floppy disks around
tonight.  I haven't touched anything on them in several years.  I'm
tempted to just throw them away, but I have a brother who would treat
them like gold.  I may give them to him instead.  I transfer everything
from computer to computer either with my external hard drive or via a
CD.  Those are so much cheaper and faster.  I'm obviously talking about
non-networked systems and file sizes that I don't want to wait on for
modem transfer.  You read it right -- I'm one of the few people left on
the face of the earth that is still in the dark ages of dial-up.

I use damaged CD's and the freebie's that I get from AOL for target
practice.  When I'm really on target, I can hit the hole in the center
of the disk at about 50 feet with a pellet gun.  Most of the time, I hit
the disk itself and it explodes like a clay pigeon.  Others can do a
whole lot better with any sort of firearm that I can.  I have the
dubious distinction of having served in the armed forces without ever
qualifying on the firing range.

Larry

-----Original Message-----
From: at-bounces at lists.antique-tractor.com
[mailto:at-bounces at lists.antique-tractor.com] On Behalf Of Mike Sloane
Sent: Sunday, January 16, 2005 4:24 PM
To: Antique tractor email discussion group
Subject: OT: Re: [AT] Backing up tractor pictures and degenerating into
aramble.

Floppies are about the worst media to keep any kind of data on. I went 
through several boxes of old floppies from the late 90s recently. These 
were stored upright in closed boxes and were mostly name brand, but some

reclaimed by doing full formats. The results were that about 10% of the 
diskettes were OK, but 90% had errors of some kind or another. 
Fortunately, there was nothing important on any of them - mostly files 
downloaded from "bulletin boards" (remember them?).

The only way to ensure that any magnetic media is sound is to 
periodically read the data off and write it back again, and very few of 
us want to go through that task. That includes Zip disks, Jazz disks, as

well as hard drives and thumb drives. I recently tried out a handful of 
older small hard drives that I had marked "OK" before setting aside, and

only 2 of the dozen or so were any good.

I have yet to have any optical media fail.

Mike

DAVIESW739 at aol.com wrote:
> I have all my finances on quicken I have it  backed up on floppy and
the hard 
> drive and also at the Quicken web site when i  had some trouble last
summer I 
> with quicken and tried to reload my data I really  screwed things up I
found 
> my floppies were not up to date and that I scrambled  my hard drive
backup and 
> then like an idiot i uploaded instead of  downloaded  my stuff on the
Quicken 
> site. I guess one cannot have to many  ways to save important data. I
spent 
> all summer inputting data from the paper  backup. Good thing the wife
keeps 
> that where I can't mess with it. maybe one of  those little drives
would be some 
> help in my situation as I keep a running  backup at all times. 
> I have XP but the backup part only backs up programs  not the data
stored by 
> them.
> 
> Walt Davies

> 

-- 
Mike Sloane
Allamuchy NJ
mikesloane at verizon.net
Images: <www.fotki.com/mikesloane>

Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, 
and there is some evidence that they can't read them either. -Gore Vidal

(1925- )


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