Disk archival

[Vintage Computer Festival]

On Mon, 16 May 2005, Teo Zenios wrote:

> Why can't a group just incorporate the images that are already made by
> machine specific groups? There is a huge scene for Atari, Commodore, Timex,
> Amiga, Tandy, etc that has already made images of just about every
> commercial and PD disk for their platform. Asking a group that already has
> everything dumped to use special tools to redump them for some other group
> is a waste of their time. I think it would be better just to document what
> each group does now, archive those images, and then create some software
> that can recreate any of the images back to disk as needed.

Because not all (if any) groups have dumped to images of any manner of
archival standard.  All we have today is a mish-mash of miscellaneous
images not dumped in a manner that preserves as much information
(metadata) of the original media as possible.

This is the problem that FutureKeep aims to resolve.  Existing images will
be able to be converted to the FutureKeep standard, but they will lack
essential metadata.  Once FutureKeep exists, it is hoped that any new
images made will be done in that universal standard.  It is also hoped
that volunteers will go back and re-image all possible software in the
FutureKeep file format.

-- 

Sellam Ismail                                        Vintage Computer Festival
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International Man of Intrigue and Danger                http://www.vintage.org

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