What's the Oldest File You Can Restore? 498
turtleshadow writes "Now that it's almost 2011, a question for anyone who's kept backups since before the Y2K non-event: Have you personally/professionally had to recover something from 10+ years ago? If so, please share the interesting 'hows,' especially if you had to do multiple media transfers and file formats to get data into a usable file format on a modern hardware platform of your choice. Native solutions are rated higher than emulation. Also, what are your plans for recovering in 2021? Street cred goes to the oldest, most technical and complex restores ... that are of course successful. I'm working the night shift Christmas/New Year's; I ask everybody still stirring and hardcore SysOPs."
cool topic (Score:0, Insightful)
but /me /join #whogivesashit
Cred to the most complex? (Score:3, Insightful)
And here I was thinking that most operations-people would rather cred the LEAST complex solution to the problem.
Just restored a 1998 backup from a DLT4000 cartridge, using tar. Oooh. Nothing fancy. ...
Re:ten years? (Score:4, Insightful)
And on the other hand, I had a disc with a Sign Language dictionary. From just about 6 years ago. Problems? The videos were encoded with Intel Indeo. Surprise, Windows dropped support for this after XPSP1. After overcoming this problem, I wanted to use the movies without the program. So I had to find the file that linked between a word and its corresponding videos (which were, of course, numbered). Good luck figuring out it was made with Macromedia, getting the new Adobe Director, updating the file... and voila! No prob.
Let's see someone do that in 10 years.
Oldest file? (Score:5, Insightful)
Kids today (Score:5, Insightful)
10+ years? Seriously - you consider that old? My website is older than that. I've got outdated copies of my resume (my wife's as well) older than that. I've got saved email messages older than that.