Obsolete Media Formats

I'd look for a mom and pop computer store. They may have older machines you can use at your leisure on-site if it is sensitive material.

You know Rush Limbaugh raves about a service called Legacy Box for various forms of media, photos, vhs tapes, disks, etc. The way he describes it they seem to be more for video and photos but it can't hurt to look.

Good luck, magnetic storage of that vintage may be scrambled.

I can handle the 3 1/2 inch disks on one of my desktops and have an OmegaZip drive packed away and a bunch of disks for both.

Never went with tape backup.

Don't know if the Zip drive will connect to my XPs they do have the port to connect.

When CDs appeared on the scene, I transferred all my data from those formats onto CD and now have it on two WD My Passport 5tb drives and a couple of thumb drives.

You can still find new looking refurbished computers on EBay that are running Win98 and Win95 that are under $100.

I have a 386 in storage that needs a new hard drive...........

USB 3 1/2" floppy disk drives can be had from Amazon for under $20. Plug and play. Probably you could find similar items for your other formats.?ÿ But, as John pointed out, chances are high that you have nothing.?ÿ

Thanks everyone for the suggestions.?ÿ I've now found several boxes of microfiche records to add yet another obsolete format.?ÿ I can piece together hardware from old computers, but I was hoping to hand off the whole crate of crap to someone and tell them "here, you deal with it".?ÿ It might be worth trying that Legacy Box.?ÿ

I've heard some people say that magnetic media lasts much longer than CD's or DVD's... I don't believe them though.

It all depends on the quality of the original media. We haven't thown away our old discs once they were backed up to more modern media. We still occasionally have to go hunting to recover very old data - from 5.25 and 3.5 discs. Very rarely do we find one of them won't read, even then the second back up normally does.

They all get kept in a cold place - some go back 25 or more years.

You can buy USB Zip drives, and floppies for about $20-30 all over the place. ?????ÿ

And then we have this:

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"Although opinions vary on how to preserve data on digital storage media, such as optical CDs and DVDs, Kurt Gerecke, a physicist and storage expert at IBM Deutschland GmbH, takes this view: If you want to avoid having to burn new CDs every few years, use magnetic tapes to store all your pictures, videos and songs for a lifetime.

"Unlike pressed original CDs, burned CDs have a relatively short life span of between two to five years, depending on the quality of the CD," Gerecke said in an interview this week. "There are a few things you can do to extend the life of a burned CD, like keeping the disc in a cool, dark space, but not a whole lot more."

The problem is material degradation. Optical discs commonly used for burning, such as CD-R and CD-RW, have a recording surface consisting of a layer of dye that can be modified by heat to store data. The degradation process can result in the data "shifting" on the surface and thus becoming unreadable to the laser beam."

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Hmm... I have CD's I burned about 12 years ago that occasionally have unreadable files. I have no idea if they were readable originally or not, I just know that i cannot read them today.

use magnetic tapes to store all your pictures, videos and songs for a lifetime

Sure, store them for a lifetime, but without the hardware and software to read them, how long are they actually useful?

I've used 2 different tape drives for backup in the past:?ÿ Colorado QIC and Ecrix (later Exabyte, later Tandberg) VXA.?ÿ The Colorado product wasn't very reliable and was pretty limited in capacity, and I abandoned it after a couple of years.?ÿ The VXA-1 had much better capacity and, I thought (due to price), better reliability, but after a few years the drive quit working.?ÿ I bought another one, but after a year or two it also died, so I gave up on VXA as well.?ÿ I went to CD-R for several years, but capacity was a problem, and after another 5 or so years I found the disks to be unreadable.?ÿ That's when I went to cloud storage, which has its own problems (high bandwidth demand and -- less of a concern -- reliability of the cloud vendor).?ÿ I have a fairly slow ADSL connection (8 mbps download, 1 mbps upload), so my 1.2GB daily upload takes a long time to choke through that little pipe.?ÿ But so far the cloud backup has been 100% reliable, which is more than I can say for its predecessor technologies.

Jim, can't you do incremental updates to shorten the time? Surely you don't generate that much new data per day.

All my past backup media on 3.5 from floppy 30yrs ago is still readable.

Stored in static proof cabinet.

Storage is the key. No electronic media can be exposed to anything that will cause some sort of a disturbance to the media. Magnetic, electric short, abrasion to the magnetic surface and hest are the most things that will disturb digital data.

The only data I have ever lost was because of idiot users on my system.

Jim, can't you do incremental updates to shorten the time? Surely you don't generate that much new data per day.

The heavy lift is the backup database itself, which is 1.25GB as of this morning.  That's the file that keeps track of all the increments belonging to each of the 271,343 files being backed up.