zip (was: Re: Disk archival techniques)

[Dwight K. Elvey]

>From: "Vintage Computer Festival" <vcf at siconic.com>
>
>On Wed, 18 May 2005, Jim Leonard wrote:
>
>> Dwight K. Elvey wrote:
>> >  It seems that may of you are missing the point. The archives
>> > are intended to be useable in say 500 years ( moved to
>> > future media ). Any proprietary application like WinRAR
>> > is useless for this purpose.
>>
>> I think that *you* are missing the point that *no* archive can last that long
>> except maybe paper.  (I say this because the media reader for paper is... all
>
>You're interpretting what Dwight is saying within your own context.
>Dwight is referring to the content itself, not the media on which the
>content (The Archive) is stored.

Thanks Sellam
 I'm debating even keeping things in ASCII for long term. Binary
is close to the original but lacks the ability to add format type
information. I still like to keep it human readable in something
like ASCII. ASCII has a relatively long history in the computer
industry. Once the information has been determined, by some future
computer geek, to be recoverable he( or she ) can quickly write
a translation program to bring it into the current environment.
 In any case, these are all academic in comparison to the problems
of indexing. I don't even have the beginings of how to deal
with that problem.
Dwight

>
>> humans. 100 years from now I wouldn't expect to be able to read a
>> DVD-ROM, for comparison.) Most digital archivsts agree that the goal is
>> not 100 years, but 10-20 so that it can be transferred to the new
>> generation of media every so often.
>
>This is now a given to anyone that's given it a couple moment's thought.

 One should try to look for media that has longer life but not as
the only storage method. Paper has been remarkably good compared
to some of the others. Overlapping of storage makes things safer.
Dwight