Reply #70: You just have to be a little more active in preserving the information [View All]

I have data that was originally entered on my Apple II computer and saved to 360k 5.25" floppies. I converted it to text format and copied it over to larger format 5.25" floppies when I got my first PC. As I upgraded my computers and storage media, I kept doing the same thing. The only data I have "lost" is stuff that I had no backed up before a hard drive crash or stuff I decided was not worth keeping.

BUT if something happens to me and I do not actively continue to move the data to new formats, it will be lost.

I can remember stories from 20 years or more ago that many military veteran records were lost because no one thought to transfer them to new media when the old computer tape machines were outmoded. Yes, they faithfully stored the tape reels, but ten years too late realized that the machines to read them were no longer in existence. And, being magnetic tape, the surface of the tapes were flaking off and may not have been readable any more.

About the same time, NASA was appealing for donations of floppy disks - the disks they needed for some of their old computers were no longer being sold and they were hoping average people would have some that could be used. In that case, if I remember correctly, Radio Shack found a stock of the right size in one of their warehouses and donated them. I seem to remember that NASA needed 8" floppies - not something the average home user would have had.

I do prefer printed books - I have an entire room in my house dedicated to my library. But we have to remember that MOST of what humans have produced has been ephemeral. Currently I am reading through my collection of old science fiction anthologies. Many of the magazines in which the stories were originally published no longer exist except in obscure private collections and most had very small distribution. So except in these old anthologies they are hard to find. Even the anthologies had little distribution, so out of the billions of people on the planet, few have seen these works. And the old paperback copies I have are disintegrating. They were printed on cheap pulp paper which is literally eating itself from the acids in it. And the glue in the binding is no longer holding the pages in - if the glue has not been eaten by insects. If these are not preserved by putting them in electronic format, I expect they will no longer exist in another fifty years - there is not enough interest to pay for re-printing them.

Another category of book whose life span has been extended are family and place histories. In the mid to late 1800s, many of those were published, often privately with small distribution. For genealogists, those were great places to find obscure family links, but they were often hard to find hidden away in local libraries and private collections. Now, many of those books have been put on the internet in a range of formats - Internet Archives (archive.org) has them for free download (as well as a lot of other media). Ancestry.com has many but you have to pay to use their excellent search engines to access them.