Computer archeology.
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And I just found them! I've copied them onto my computer, and I'm trying to rescue the rest now just in case - but that's complicated because the computer is XP 32 bit, and I can't get AOMEI to work on it, it gives me CRC errors and stops copying, it doesnt like my 256Gb USB stick, and I don't want to turn it off because there is a good chance the HDD may never work again if I do... Ah, the fun we have on a Sunday!
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640 Never throw anything away, Griff Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay... AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
Why don't you use an old Hiren's boot // BartPE or similars from that time?
M.D.V. ;) If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about? Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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An example of Digital dark age.[^]
I participated in a few international library projects a few years ago, and encountered two quite different attitudes: One group said, "We must standardize on digital formats so that we all can read everybody's document files fifty and hundred years from now", and the other one saying: "Let each library use the formats of their choice! Fifty or hundred years from now, chances are then much higher that there will be readers for at least one of the formats that were used by all the libraries preserving the document". I am very much in favor of standands, preferably with as few competing alternative standards as possible. Yet I see the arguments for not standardizing but preserving data in a multitude of formats. Too many times I have selected The Ultimate Format for my private files, deciding to convert all my text documents to The Ultimate Text Format, photos to The Ultimate Image Format and so on. It never works. I never get around to convert all my files to The Ultimate before it is no longer The Ultimate. I have even lost access to files that I did convert at some time to The Ultimate, but failed to convert to the next Ultimate while I still had the hardware to do so. Long time preservation of files requires not just a single format, but a whole stack of standards. It won't help you that the file is PDF/A if you stored it on an 8" floppy. Even if you dig up an 8" floppy unit somewhere, the sectoring may be different: I have a huge pile of floppies with 2048 byte sectors (IBM and most others used 128 byte). So you write a driver that can read the huge sectors, making a disk image file on a modern PC. But the file system is neither MS-DOS, NTFS nor any Unix-family file system: Disk sectors are organized in an "unknown" way. I happen to know it - I know all the details of the Sintran file system, but not very many people do, nowadays. So I can write an extractor to select, in the right order, those sectors making up, say, a PDF/A file. This is a simple case, when you know the format, which is well defined. There may be more layers. Once I was consulted by a company who needed to retrieve some information in unknown format from some floppies - I could extract the files, but they looked pure gibberish, not readable text. I noticed that some characters were more frequent than others, which gave away one secret: The text was not ASCII characters, but EBCDIC (i.e. IBM's old character code - which existed in umpteen variants, analogous to DOS "code pages"). What I got out was a lot of small text fragments
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Maybe I am a little too obsessed - now I've got the files I want off, I've got it to run as a USB disk attached to my "real" PC, and guess what I'm doing? Yes, that's right! A backup of it! :laugh: Don't think it'll work though - it's got 3GB backed up and it's making some very nasty noises.
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640 Never throw anything away, Griff Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay... AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
Griff, I agree with you. One can't be too thin, one can't be too rich, and one can never, ever have too many backups! No Joking, I am serious. What you need is a an index of what is stored on each device. Please send me a copy after you have written one.
I had a copy of my signature line but I lost it.
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I'm looking for some pictures I took back in the last decade, and sent to someone who since died and can I find 'em? His family would like a copy. Nope - but I have had NAS failures, HDD failures, and running-out-of-space-what-the-heck-do-I-delete failures since then, and even I don't keep backups that are over ten years old ... unfortunately. Maybe I should. :-O So, I remember my stack of redundant HDDs - I get a bigger one, the old one goes on the pile. Dig out my old ATA to USB box as my current MB doesn't support ATA drives at all. And ... all but one of them I've overwrite wiped, formatted, and re-fdisked ready for me to smash them to pieces with a big hammer but I never got round to that bit. The last one? Doesn't fit in the converter box because it's a Maxstore and it;s connectoirs are upside down. :sigh: Then I remember Herself's computer. The one she hasn't turned on for so long it's still using the WiFi Router ID for three routers ago ... it's an HP ... That'll have ATA. Connect it all back up, power it up, it works. Turn off, set the drive to slave, connect it up, power it up ... and it's blank. Sod. Turn it off again. You have to remember that this is XP territory, and booting is quite slow. (And it's strange to see two physical processors in one machine instead of one). But then I see a second HDD bolted into her computer, but not connected. Now, there are two possibilities here: 1) It's the original HDD from this PC which died and there may just be some of my data on it. 2) It's the original HDD from my HP PC which died shortly after hers and it's probably catatonic by now. Let's see ... BOIS starts to scream at me "THIS DRIVE IS DYING!" Great, that means it's not dead yet. Oh boy - it's the motherload. My HDD from 2010 which died. We could be lucky here. And sure enough, there is the HTML file I sent the pictures in. Don't ask. Just don't. Are they embedded? No, they are linked to a picture storage website ... that doesn't exist any more. But, I'm copying everything I can find off the computer to a USB stick and the pictures may be there. If not, they are gone for good. I'll see what I can find when I get it on my PC in a couple of hours, USB1 is so slooooowwww. Somebody remind me: "never throw anything away, Griff" please!
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640 Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay... AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is n
Maybe this is a little depressing (yes, it is!): I have the opposite problem. I have been preserving lots of stuff: Letters and other stuff I have written and received, many thousand photos, videos and movies from the Super-8 age converted to digital video, sound recordings from when I was a boy myself, from when I was a father, from lots of stuff... And I realize that the day I say goodbye, it will all go directly to the dump. Noone cares. They do not even watch the videos for being polite, but raise up to make a can of coffee while waiting for the movie to complete. Or, if it is something more recent, they argue like "Well, I was there, I remember it well without the photos", and start chatting with someone else. Photos and smartphone videos are for laughing at what you did at the party last weekend. Or to display your social, cultural or sports achievements last weekend. Once it has been displayed in your Facebook page and seen by your Facebook friends the same day, it has served its purpose. Of course it will reside in your FB profile "forever", but noone cares to look at it again; they've seen it before, and there are thousands of more recent, more relevant pictures. I have lost a few files because I didn't get around to convert them until it waw too late. But I know that noone will feel the loss. Noone would ever ask for them. Noone ever asks for that kind of memories. With one exception: People even older than myself. A few of them, at least. I made a video from a social gathering of mostly retired people and gave them each a copy - they more than say thank you, they even later commented on the "documentary". Younger people would have said "Naaah... I do not use DVDs any more, but if you can put it on YouTube, I might have a look". Then I nod, forget about YouTube, and the youngsters never ask me about it again. They didn't fail to find it, they never tried to find it on YouTube. So why don't I just dump my entire archive now, relieving those coming after me from the work. Might as well.
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Maybe this is a little depressing (yes, it is!): I have the opposite problem. I have been preserving lots of stuff: Letters and other stuff I have written and received, many thousand photos, videos and movies from the Super-8 age converted to digital video, sound recordings from when I was a boy myself, from when I was a father, from lots of stuff... And I realize that the day I say goodbye, it will all go directly to the dump. Noone cares. They do not even watch the videos for being polite, but raise up to make a can of coffee while waiting for the movie to complete. Or, if it is something more recent, they argue like "Well, I was there, I remember it well without the photos", and start chatting with someone else. Photos and smartphone videos are for laughing at what you did at the party last weekend. Or to display your social, cultural or sports achievements last weekend. Once it has been displayed in your Facebook page and seen by your Facebook friends the same day, it has served its purpose. Of course it will reside in your FB profile "forever", but noone cares to look at it again; they've seen it before, and there are thousands of more recent, more relevant pictures. I have lost a few files because I didn't get around to convert them until it waw too late. But I know that noone will feel the loss. Noone would ever ask for them. Noone ever asks for that kind of memories. With one exception: People even older than myself. A few of them, at least. I made a video from a social gathering of mostly retired people and gave them each a copy - they more than say thank you, they even later commented on the "documentary". Younger people would have said "Naaah... I do not use DVDs any more, but if you can put it on YouTube, I might have a look". Then I nod, forget about YouTube, and the youngsters never ask me about it again. They didn't fail to find it, they never tried to find it on YouTube. So why don't I just dump my entire archive now, relieving those coming after me from the work. Might as well.
Member 7989122 wrote:
So why don't I just dump my entire archive now, relieving those coming after me from the work. Might as well.
Your ungrateful relatives won't care, but future Doctoral candidates in archaeology will. Please don't deprive them of their subject matter! I took over managing the family tree from my mother, expanding it quite a bit into the past and adding much detail, and have a 13-year-old daughter who's showing interest in it. We'll see how long this lasts, when she realizes the amount of work involved. :sigh:
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. -- 6079 Smith W.
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Griff, I agree with you. One can't be too thin, one can't be too rich, and one can never, ever have too many backups! No Joking, I am serious. What you need is a an index of what is stored on each device. Please send me a copy after you have written one.
I had a copy of my signature line but I lost it.
Ed Aymami wrote:
Please send me a copy after you have written one.
:thumbsup: Upvoted.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. -- 6079 Smith W.
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I am a little OCD where backups are concerned, yes ... :-O
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640 Never throw anything away, Griff Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay... AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
Reminds me... I was grumbling to my boss one day about lost work after a power outage. I had typed alot but not Saved recently. The boss replied, "You know what the Bible says about this?" Me: "No, what?" Him: "Jesus Saves, you should do the same." Likely, the almighty would be a fan of frequent back-ups too.
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I'm looking for some pictures I took back in the last decade, and sent to someone who since died and can I find 'em? His family would like a copy. Nope - but I have had NAS failures, HDD failures, and running-out-of-space-what-the-heck-do-I-delete failures since then, and even I don't keep backups that are over ten years old ... unfortunately. Maybe I should. :-O So, I remember my stack of redundant HDDs - I get a bigger one, the old one goes on the pile. Dig out my old ATA to USB box as my current MB doesn't support ATA drives at all. And ... all but one of them I've overwrite wiped, formatted, and re-fdisked ready for me to smash them to pieces with a big hammer but I never got round to that bit. The last one? Doesn't fit in the converter box because it's a Maxstore and it;s connectoirs are upside down. :sigh: Then I remember Herself's computer. The one she hasn't turned on for so long it's still using the WiFi Router ID for three routers ago ... it's an HP ... That'll have ATA. Connect it all back up, power it up, it works. Turn off, set the drive to slave, connect it up, power it up ... and it's blank. Sod. Turn it off again. You have to remember that this is XP territory, and booting is quite slow. (And it's strange to see two physical processors in one machine instead of one). But then I see a second HDD bolted into her computer, but not connected. Now, there are two possibilities here: 1) It's the original HDD from this PC which died and there may just be some of my data on it. 2) It's the original HDD from my HP PC which died shortly after hers and it's probably catatonic by now. Let's see ... BOIS starts to scream at me "THIS DRIVE IS DYING!" Great, that means it's not dead yet. Oh boy - it's the motherload. My HDD from 2010 which died. We could be lucky here. And sure enough, there is the HTML file I sent the pictures in. Don't ask. Just don't. Are they embedded? No, they are linked to a picture storage website ... that doesn't exist any more. But, I'm copying everything I can find off the computer to a USB stick and the pictures may be there. If not, they are gone for good. I'll see what I can find when I get it on my PC in a couple of hours, USB1 is so slooooowwww. Somebody remind me: "never throw anything away, Griff" please!
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640 Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay... AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is n
If you do find them, they'll probably be in PCX or TGA. Then you'll have to start hunting for some software which can still read them. :laugh:
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined." - Homer
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined" - Homer
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If you do find them, they'll probably be in PCX or TGA. Then you'll have to start hunting for some software which can still read them. :laugh:
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined." - Homer
JPG - but Paintshop Pro reads pretty much everything, including PCX and TGA! Despite being a Corel product these days, it's still a good alternative to Photochop.
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640 Never throw anything away, Griff Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay... AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Because if you don't know which is error correction, or even what error correction there was ... MD5 is a known, published algorithm which makes it a whole lot easier to reverse engineer. Imagine you have a small executable file, but you don't know what it does, or what processor it was compiled for. And it might use EBCDIC, it might use ASCII, it could be English, it could be Katakana. Now write the emulator that runs it! :laugh:
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640 Never throw anything away, Griff Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay... AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
They should release the data into a group of enthusiasts like ours. With a co-operative effort I reckon it will be decoded
Live long and prosper
