On 28 Sep 2007, at 14:52, Rob Ratkowski Photography wrote:
I really like my LaCie 250 GB USB2 external drives, plug and play, also Firewire too
This thread has me thinking of an article in the July issue of S&T mentioned in a Letter to the Editor in the current issue about archiving observing logs. I'm reminded of a story I read about NASA not being able to access much of its early data because they were stored on media that no machine today can read. The Planetary Society is having a similar problem with early Pioneer 10 and 11 data as they investigate the Pioneer Anomaly. So I wonder about the wisdom of archiving anything only in a digital format. For years I kept all of my observing logs on paper but after getting my first Mac in 1984 I started doing both paper and digital. Macs have been great with reading old files. In fact as recently as 2 years ago I was able to use my then new G4 to run all the stuff going back 20+ years. But then I bought one of the new I Macs running Tiger and was a bit disappointed to see that it could not read old word processing files (fortunately it still reads some other old things) so I spent a lot of time with the G4 converting 20+ years of word processing files to basic text files that even Windows machines can read. But I'm still concerned that no matter what digital form I archive in today they will one day be unreadable. So I'm still keeping both paper and digital logs. How are others handling this problem? patrick