Excellent commentary. We spent some time really thinking about this at work.
I had been "doing computers", for almost 5 decades. I have been user, system manager,
network designer, network operator, network hardware installer, etc. for our computers at
work from PCs to Unix workstations, to Minicomputers (Vax) and then ultimately supercomputers, like
Crays and SGI, original style and at the end we had multiple 2048 CPU supercomputers.
None of this was because I was "a computer guy". I was doing engineering, and couldn't
get the tools or get them run to suit unless I did it myself. Finally managed to get enough
skilled folks working for me the last 10 yrs that I could wash my hands entirely of the
sysmanager and hardware stuff. Very happy to go back and only do engineering, and
at that point mentoring and project management.
We had been through a lot of different backups, from punch cards, to reel to reel tapes,
to single reel tapes, to tape cartridges (remember TK50s?), VHS tapes (data) and
optical platters, removable hard disks, and more.
We realized it was pretty complex. Far more complex than at first glance.
1. Will your media survive? This is about where most folks stop thinking.
2. Will you have a hardware device which will read your media?
3. Will you have a computer, OS and driver that will talk to your hardware device?
Find a floppy drive. See if you can connect it to your current PC and make it read
floppys. It may happen, but I doubt it will be easy, and perhaps not even possible
anymore. That was only a couple of decades ago!
4. If you recover the zeroes and ones, will you have any software that will run on
the OS and computer of the future which will be able to interpret those zeroes and
ones and do something useful with it?
It is not just the media, there are several more hardware, driver, OS and software
layers - any one of which can just totally screw you on "recovering your data".
For example. If you have a perfectly good TK50 tape cartridge today, do you know of anyone
who has a VAX computer with a working drive to read it - assuming that the ferric oxide hasn't
fallen off of the mylar - which it does do. May be a VAX or too still working, but will not
be very many.
I have a couple of IBM punchcard decks that I kept for sentimental reasons (my master's
degree software) and I seriously doubt that there is any way to use them any more and
read the data that they contain. Even if you have a IBM 29, will it run on any current
OS? That was current technology in 1975.
Recently tried to load a legit copy of Office 2003 on an older computer. Could not
get the online validation to work, even though it loaded perfectly. Without that you have
30 days and it shuts down. Called MicroSoft. Basically "Tough S#!+", we don't support
that anymore and don't care that you bought "permanent" license. So, if you need special
software to use your files, even if you have the software, can you load it and use
it if the company dies or doesn't help in the future?
Bill