> > Pity he makes no mention of the potential state of those shoeboxes full of > silver-fish eaten stained and mould damaged prints not to mention the missing > scratched, folded and otherwise unprintable negs. > > All media has limitations, if you want the best out of anything you have to > exercise current best storage/file maintenance practice to ensure its longevity > its not rocket science (well not at the user end anyhow).
He also overstates the case for media obsolescence. Sure, it's hard to get a 5.25" floppy drive now (although if you had one, you could still plug it into the IDE floppy controller on a modern motherboard). But the last computer I had with a 5.25" floppy drive also had a CD writer (and I'd already copied all the data onto 3.5" floppies, as well). You need to copy those old media onto the new formats every five years or so, but that's generally not a big deal - storage capacity increases so fast that it's unlikely that you'll need more than one blank. (A single CD, for example, would hold over 500 5.25" floppies if you had the patience to copy that many, and if you could read that much data from a 5.25" floppy drive without errors :-) I've got a box of obsolete storage drives (and controller cards) just in case I want to put together a system that can read old stuff. That includes a 5.25" floppy drive, a SCSI DAT drive, and a 100Mb Zip drive (the 2 GB Jazz drive is still in a current system). The biggest problem I see is that it might be hard to get a motherboard with anything other than PCI slots to plug controller cards into; as USB and FireWire become even more widespread there will be less incentive for manufacturers to put any card slots inside the case.
