tensixtyone

Slashdot has posted a article on the problems of digital archiving and the depreciation of hardware. Its interesting to see how people are currently trying to recover data from the late 60s to the early 80s, and actually succeeding with it.

Slashdot has posted a article on the problems of digital archiving and the depreciation of hardware. Its interesting to see how people are currently trying to recover data from the late 60s to the early 80s, and actually succeeding with it.

While i’m not at the age to have a digital archive of old documents and software i’ve wrote, i can see this happening in the future. At the moment i’ve got several gig of data on my laptop, if i lost that i’d be heartbroken as theres alot of images which are irreplacable.

The solution is to keep modernising and upgrading your needs and hardware to new modern methods, but what happens when you fall behind? Several years ago i made the jump from a old Amiga 500 to a Pentium 75, it was not a hard jump as i was only hitting middle of high school and nothing have been built up yet. On the other hand my brother was a graphic artist in the amiga demo scene, he has hundreds of disks full of artwork, demos, and various other tools. The Amiga uses file formats which can still be used today, thanks to the Amiga IFF (interchangable file format) which was used for a multitude of applications. All of my brothers artwork can be simply converted into JPEG/GIF/BMP with the help of a simple job in Photoshop.

…The main problem is getting it to the PC. AmigaOS 2.0 used to support DD FAT16 formatted disks, but it was slow, very slow. Getting hold of the software is no problem due to the Internet, getting to an actual disk is harder. Over the last two years i’ve collected a wealth of old Amiga hardware to attempt this recovery mission. I’ve got a Amiga 600, 3.1 Kickstart, fitted with a 6gb HDD, a PCMCIA 10mbit BaseT Ethernet card, and a very simple TCP/IP stack. I’m limited by the onboard memory by what i can do, and i could do with 1mb upgrade board (if you’ve got one hanging around, please email me!). At the moment i can connect the A600 to my PC via Serial and copy files and disk images across it. Knowing me i’ve probably lost the software now…

I’m considering starting a website with this in mind, much like a social networking tool for people with the means to recover data. Like i can recover pritty much anything created or stored on Amiga media, i’d like to advertise that service to other people who need there data recovering. I’ll keep you updated if that ever comes into production.