If you were anywhere near a computer in the mid-to-late 1990s, you almost certainly encountered a Zip drive. That distinctive purple peripheral, with its satisfying clunk as you slotted in a cartri…
I remember cataloging and transferring a bunch of a laboratory’s “Bernoulli” cartridges to Zip because they worried that they wouldn’t be able to replace the Bernoulli drive if/when it failed. Then to CD, because it was incomprehensible that optical drives would go the way of the floppy. Probably a decade of data, and I think it fit on like 20 CDROMs.
For a while, I thought it was ok to just keep everything on multiple hard drives, but now it would take a special effort to get data off those IDE HDDs. And SSDs decay if not powered. It’s hard to keep electronic data for 100 years.
It’s sad that optical media storage is essentially dead now. I burned a zillion cds over the years, and 99% of them were perfect even 10 years later. And at some point i started adding 10% PAR2 files to the discs, which made it so even if up to 10% of the cd was totally unreadable you could still recover 100% of the data. Heck, PAR2 file software becoming abandoned hurts at least as much.
Does anyone know of a modern version of PAR2 files?
I remember cataloging and transferring a bunch of a laboratory’s “Bernoulli” cartridges to Zip because they worried that they wouldn’t be able to replace the Bernoulli drive if/when it failed. Then to CD, because it was incomprehensible that optical drives would go the way of the floppy. Probably a decade of data, and I think it fit on like 20 CDROMs.
For a while, I thought it was ok to just keep everything on multiple hard drives, but now it would take a special effort to get data off those IDE HDDs. And SSDs decay if not powered. It’s hard to keep electronic data for 100 years.
I bought into the carbon-based BluRay discs. Good for 1000 years, right? ;) I haven’t ever checked them since writing data to them.
It’s sad that optical media storage is essentially dead now. I burned a zillion cds over the years, and 99% of them were perfect even 10 years later. And at some point i started adding 10% PAR2 files to the discs, which made it so even if up to 10% of the cd was totally unreadable you could still recover 100% of the data. Heck, PAR2 file software becoming abandoned hurts at least as much.
Does anyone know of a modern version of PAR2 files?
A lot of the software has been abandoned, but par2cmdline is still being updated. The last commit was last month.
Yes: PAR2