I've been trying to sort through some old external hard drives I had in storage and one big challenge is even finding the right cables and in some cases trying to find an old laptop with the right firewire connector or whatever. (This is *not* a request for advice, just an observation.)
One of the interesting things about the Internet is that we’re actually living through a dark age. Future historians are unlikely to have records of this period.
Paper and ink last. Digital storage, less so.
variety.com/2024/tv/news...
One of the greatest regulations recently IMO is the EU telling manufacturers "everyone use the same god damn cable", I know exactly what you're talking about here, esp with old hard drive power supplies.
Unfortunately, this doesn't address cables and ports aging out.
Tech optimism or conventional wisdom 20 years ago was "everything will last forever" and setting aside makor companies deleting or pulling archives, it's not actually lasting forever if no contemporary computer can read or connect to a device or storage system.
Years ago during a move I came across a box of Zip, Jaz, and Syquest cartridges that I hadn’t had drives for in almost a decade at that point. I could only assume if I hadn’t needed the files by then, they were garbage as there was no hope of gaining access to them without major effort and expense.
I cleared out some 30 year old floppies for this reason. Might have been something interesting on them, the amount of effort it would have taken to find out was nothing I was interested in.
It is a serious and ongoing problem for librarians and archivists. I seem to remember one of my library science professors talking about someone having to store and maintain the machine that played audio wax cylinders
I've worked for several data protection software companies and have had customers tell me they want really long retention periods, and I always bring up the question of "what media are you going to use, and how are you going to read it N years from now?"
I've always found that the correct answer to "Will I ever need this cable again?" is "Of course not, that's ridiculous. Time marches on; progress is inevitable." And "I absolutely will, but just once, & it will be an emergency, & I will have no idea where I put it."
Yeah this is a constant, renewing struggle. Legacy cables are a problem, bitrot is a problem, usable software to read files is a problem, etc. If you're not periodically moving data forward through time, it gets harder and harder to retrieve. Really is like a second job sometimes.
I'd say 90% of what's on those drives has been "moved forward through time," I'm just trying to figure out what the other 10% might be and whether it's worth saving
Thank you for reminding me that there's an old Firewire drive on my desk, under a layer of dust, that has basically my entire CD collection circa 2010 ripped to it.
I need to boot my old iBook and get all that stuff onto a couple thumb drives, if it'll still spin up.
two decades ago i bought an external usb hard drive and i plugged it in a few months ago and it felt miraculous that it even worked and found a bunch of old shit i thought i'd lost, i copied it all off, the only weird thing is there's mp3 files that copied but dont show up on my new pc, v funny
Funny, I’ve been going through attic boxes looking for some old drives with early recording projects that I never transferred. No drives yet but I have a whole box worth of assorted obsolete cables and adaptors to use with the drives if I ever find them!
