Well, that's quite obvious. It's much easier to destroy a compact disc than to shred an entire encyclopaedia set which is equivalent to the amount of data the disc is capable of containing.
Well, there’s always .txt.
Even with this fancy formats, you can always cat them on a Unix box, or edit in vi.
If I wrote a telephone number on it - shelf life won't reach 100 seconds.
This is a very serious issue complicated by the fact that there is a growing tenancy to require businesses to retain records for longer periods of time. This is often an issue not realized by the business until too late.
My recommendations to a business that faces a 5 year or greater records retention need is to create a “record” - actually an image of the standard operating system loaded with all of the appropriate applications necessary to read any of the file formats for that year. Then, during the annual records archival process, store that image along with the data.
This then creates an image for each year stored on a CD or DVD. But what happens for systems say 10 years down the road when CD players are no longer available? While this does tend to solve the software issues, what do you do about hardware compatibility?
I know one company that buys new PC hardware every 2 years and replaces 1/3 of their companies PCs at that time. What they do is buy an extra system and mothball it right away in their archives room. Brand new PC, sitting there doing nothing .... just for the purpose of having a working system to read old files / software programs.
Some programs are better than others at this. The current WordPerfect can still read early ‘80s Wordstar. Even a brand new machine can boot into DOS, and run old copies of Multimate . For the really hard up, there are conversion services. We’ve been through this before . . . punch cards, DEC tape, paper tape anybody? How about 9 track? The really important stuff has been moved onto optical disc already. You can find old CPM , Atari and Commodore stuff on FTP servers anywhere. The old Unix stuff never even went away.
Currently, we have a newly mature industry. Yeah, we have trubles reading old compugraphics diskettes, and forget those 160MB tape cartridges! However, PDF, HTML and XML are industry wide standards. PDF in particular, is not going anywhere for a long, LONG time (for one thing US Gov issues docs in that format, and the readers are free).
The same problem exists with photos. Photos taken during the Civil War are more permanent than those taken since the fifties. Inks fade and disappear whereas those old silver emulsions never fade.
I recently transferred about 800 kodachrome and ektachrome slides taken in Viet Nam to digital format. About 2/3’s of them were OK, but the remaining 1/3 were color faded in all but the reds. By faded, I mean there was no trace of any color except red.
If it's not important, file it in the circular file. If it is important, and your machine lacks the needed drive, run out and buy a USB floppy drive.
I recently found a floppy from 1988 and managed to read it just fine. It contained a Lotus spreadsheet analysis of a proposed real estate investment.
LOL
If it's important, Wikipedia will preserve it.
Mark
OMG!!! It is the Y2K crap all over again. The world is going to end shortly!!!!
or the muzzies could be dancing around bonfires fueled by same in 20 years.