Tuesday 12 July 2005

Pic of the day: "I was saving them for later!" Alas, that is not always a good idea. Here a screenshot from the anime Mahoraba ~Heartful Days~.

Data rot

Since nothing interesting happened, let me talk about data rot. Recently I wanted to look through my old zip disks, to see if I could find some photos I took some years ago. I plugged in the Iomega and put the disks in. But all I could see was a message that this disk was compressed. I don't even remember what version of Windows I used at the time. 95 or 98? Back then it had seemed a very good idea to compress the disks, it almost doubled the capacity. But now the capacity is zero, because Drivespace was changed and then, I believe, abandoned. It used to be under system tools. And anyway, if it were supported under Windows XP, it would have auto-detected the disk compression.

I am not going to set up a Win95 machine to read those disks. And I am not going to read my old 5.25" floppies again, from the time when floppies actually were floppy. The things I have stored may be kinda nostalgic, but not THAT important. Probably mostly pathetic attempts at fiction, back when I was even worse at it than now, and in Norwegian.

Likewise I saw in one of my old entries that I had listened to a couple .MOD files that I downloaded from a BBS before I moved to the Internet. At the time I still had a .mod player. I am sure I could find one somewhere on the Net still, but I doubt I am ever going to bother. I don't even know where those files are now. Probably on one of those zip disks...

Sometimes when I read through an old entry, I delete links that are dead and where I don't know of a new location. I don't always take the time to do this, but it happens. It is amazing how many sites that are just gone. Of course, my own diary was hosted on sol.no at the time, before they changed the name to online.no. And if I live another year, I am quite possibly leaving this location too, focusing entirely on the new domain, Chaosnode.net. That is, if Dreamhost stays solvent. In this industry, you never know. Here today, gone tomorrow. I prepaid for two years, I am loath to pay for more than that, because the expected lifetime of a successful web enterprise is not much more. Usually they are bought out, but some just fold, and others change beyond recognition.

I am told that CDs are supposed to last for 10 years. I would not know, but music CDs seem to have lasted longer than that. As for the CDs I have burned, I very rarely access any of them. I have stacks of them, and later DVDs, small stacks on the top shelf. If I live another five years, perhaps the standard has changed so much that I don't know how to access them. Who knows? The future is a big unknown, except that all things that have form are subject to decay.

In our history
the past's stowed away.
And there we shall all be
forgotten some day.

Finn Kalvik, Velkommen ombord (translated by me).