Disks as a Roll Conservation Medium
By Jim Gallops
Personally, (and this is from experience), if you recopy the data on your floppies every couple of years to another floppy (or other medium) things should be fine.
As an example, I have had many Violano rolls that I have been archiving in an obscure format on 8 inch soft sectored floppies. These rolls were recorded before the advent of PCs and MIDI. (How many 8 inch floppy drives have you seen lately?) So in order to protect the 60 or so disk I have, I migrated the contents to 5 1/4 inch disks after a few years. Again, after 3 1/2 inch media came out, I migrated to them. Right now, I am in the processes of burning the data onto CD-ROM.
Because digital data is so easy to replicate, the life of the media should not be a problem as long as copies are made on a regular basis. The real problem as I see it is what does the data mean. As an example, if I gave you a copy of the Violano rolls that I have archived, you would have great difficulty in figuring out what the data means and how to get it to play. So, I have written a description with the data of how to interpret it. It would be a shame if the data survives, but the format is unknown.
25 years from now will MIDI SMF Type 1 (or 0 or 2) still survive? If so, will there be documentation to explain it. (Lets hope so.) So, I try to put an explanation of how to interpret the data with it. So many of the things we call "Standards" today are short lived; especially in the computer world.
Just my 2 cents worth.
Jim Gallops
gallops@gallops.com |
(Message sent Fri 8 Mar 1996, 16:03:53 GMT, from time zone GMT-0800.) |
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