{"id":12158,"date":"2005-12-02T14:42:07","date_gmt":"2005-12-02T14:42:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.adobe.com\/jnackdev\/2005\/12\/trilobites-kilobytes.html"},"modified":"2005-12-02T14:42:07","modified_gmt":"2005-12-02T14:42:07","slug":"trilobites_kilobytes-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/2005\/12\/02\/trilobites_kilobytes-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Trilobites &#038; Kilobytes"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I want to prevent cruelty to dead horses &amp; avoid beating them whenever possible, and I hate scare tactics.  But sitting on the floor of my apartment this week, trying to hoover the data off my old beige G3\/266 and onto my PowerBook, I was reminded of why we&#8217;re bothering with this whole <a href=\"http:\/\/www.adobe.com\/products\/dng\/main.html\">DNG<\/a> thing.  Innovation means change, leading to incompatibility, meaning that without some thought given to preservation, your work is at risk.<br \/>\nIt was only 5 years ago that the G3 in question was my desktop workhorse, but in simply trying to recover its data I discovered:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>AppleTalk transfer between OS 8.6 and 10.4 fails.  The machines could see each other, but transfers would immediately stall.  I get why Apple wouldn&#8217;t test this scenarios heavily, but still, it&#8217;s only been 5 years.\n<li>Connecting a current hard drive was out, given that USB and FireWire weren&#8217;t supported on this machine.  And good luck finding SCSI components in a store now.\n<li>You can still track down a Zip drive these days, but the new ones can&#8217;t write Zip100 disks.  Luckily they can still read them.\n<li>GoLive 8 (CS2) can&#8217;t read a site file produced by GoLive 4.\n<li>Self-running Director presentations no longer work (my fault, given that I don&#8217;t maintain Classic on this machine, but it&#8217;s an indicator of the transience of the work).<\/ul>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Sneakernet\">Sneakernet<\/a> and Zip disks ended up providing the solution, and as I played three-card monte with the disks, I browsed Bill Bryson&#8217;s <i><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/076790818X\/qid=1133547757\/sr=8-1\/ref=pd_bbs_1\/103-1885571-2181400?n=507846&amp;s=books&amp;v=glance\">A Short History of Nearly Everything<\/a><\/i>.  Reading about the development of the fossil record, I had to smile.  Picking through a circa-2000 machine felt a little like looking at the Burgess Shale, searching for signs of life.<br \/>\nIn the end I was able to keep the bulk of my data, but the process offered some useful perspective.  If talking to a machine from 5 years back was this tricky using the same platform, how would it be for one from ten years back?  15?  And how will you get at today&#8217;s data in 15 years?  Seems like a good case for making images &amp; the edits done to them as open and portable as possible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I want to prevent cruelty to dead horses &amp; avoid beating them whenever possible, and I hate scare tactics. But sitting on the floor of my apartment this week, trying to hoover the data off my old beige G3\/266 and onto my PowerBook, I was reminded of why we&#8217;re bothering with this whole DNG thing. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[30],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12158"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12158"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12158\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}