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0 pointsknyazhefilms5y ago0 comments

>My timeline is much longer than 20 years.

What storage format do you use then? Are you concerned about Hard drives format becoming obsolete? Are you using Mac or Windows? What if tomorow Apple or Microsoft decide to stop support for their formats? What would you consider as a reliable Storage format? Do you trust linux formats ext3 ext4? What would be your ideal choice looking from your perspective which I really share. It's really a big question for me how reliably store things for long periods of time.

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WalterBright5y ago

I copy them forward to new media every year or so. It's how I avoid bit rot and media obsolescence.

My files have survived magtapes, DECtapes, 8" floppies, 5.25" floppies, 3.5" floppies, zip drives, CDs, DVDs, blurays, 6 Mb hard disks (yes, 6 megabytes!), many no-longer-readable hard drives, and that about covers it.

Just keep copying them forward, and rotate among more than one drive.

My experience is that every media device and every media format becomes unreadable after a few years.

I learned programming on punch cards. I wish I'd kept my punch card decks, but they'd be unreadable by now. Unreadable by machine, that is, I could decode them by hand.

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