On Sun, 21 Dec 2003, Scott Allen wrote:

...

That day is a long way off, but I guard the floppies that constitute the shred of hope that someday I'll get those files back !

If you haven't already, you would be wise to make duplicates of those floppies, and also burn images of them to a CD-ROM. Floppies lose their magnetism over time and thus have a shelf life of ~10-20 years. They may no longer read when you get around to trying to use them...

Brace yourself: the shelf life of a burned CD-R or CD-RW is likewise uncertain. The archival librarians don't consider even CDROMs (real factory-stamped ones, not user-burned disks) to be an archival-class medium, because of concerns about the longevity of some of the materials used in them. If you want to be sure you will always be able to read something, there is no substitute for making a fresh copy every 5-10 years. Henry Spencer henry-lqW1N6Cllo0sV2N9l4h3zg at public.gmane.org -- The Toronto Linux Users Group. Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml