2007/04/26: Migrating - Have you checked your files lately??
I'm in the process of doing spring cleaning in my office(s). I pulled out a bunch of 3.5" floppies and zip disks. A big bunch. I'm cursing myself for ignoring the situation. I should have reviewed these files and migrated them years ago. Fortunately I still have access to both types of disk drive.I found papers dating back to my undergraduate years -- that's 1990-94. Most of my electronic files have updated easily to current formats. The older ones were a bit trickier. They were in WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS. They ended up having some garbage in the text when I converted, which was a pain. Now I'm just enduring the tedium of viewing the contents of the disks, deciding what to keep, then wiping the disks so somebody else can use them (anybody want a pile of free disks?).
I'm going to move my files to dedicated server space rather than keeping them on fixed media. I think this will help with future refreshing and/or migrations. I definitely will visit my files a bit more frequently than every 10 years. I suppose I should do it each year when the time changes from standard to daylight savings and vice versa. Just like changing batteries in your smoke detectors.
I'm lucky. I didn't lose anything I value -- except perhaps my time. This is probably better done more frequently with fewer files.
Labels: digital preservation, electronic files, migration, refreshing
posted by Laura @ 1:26 PM
2 Comments:
I've been thinking about this recently, esp. in terms of digital photos. The gentleman I spoke with at the Metro archives was concerned because he has +/- 10 years of images on floppy disks. He's of the mind that there will be a decode or two of history from which we'll end up losing most of our images becuase of this.
It seems like hosting them on a server would be a simple answer. No longer the problem of media. But still problems of file formats, etc. But eliminating one variable is better than nothing.
I've been mulling the idea over of something like a cross between Flickr and Archive-It.
Sadly, I thought of the idea too late to write a paper on it this semster, which is a bummer, because I'm way more interested in this now than in my current designated topic (blogs).
If you ever run into this again or want to try for a cleaner conversion, I recommend a license for Conversions Plus. In the last year I have used it to recover data from Mac Write 1.0 files from 1984-85 (it doesn't strictly speaking do v1.0 -- it can convert 2.0 and later), and convert WP for DOS files from 1989-1991 to Word. That allowed me to recover my graduate school files and system documentation I wrote in my first 2 jobs. The trickier issue was finding drives to read ancient Mac disks and 5.25" DOS floppies. I had to rely on a vintage computer collector friend and a gov docs librarian who maintains a DOS machine.
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