BBC: Why your early 2000s photos are probably lost forever

[Shadams]

Downloading to a new HD gives me the opportunity to cull unwanted images, which I badly need to do. But the time factor, sigh...

Cull nothing! Todays turkey could be tomorrow's peacock. It has happened to memore often than I care to admit. Storage space is cheap. But you cannot get back that deleted image.

Yeah, I figured out long ago that archiving the out takes was faster than deleting them. I'm old, still fit, but I'm smart or at least experienced enough to know that I must use my time wisely.

 

[Shadams]

Yeh but to be fair NOT if you are the one showing the slides. Only for those watching! 😉 😆 😆 😆

Yeah...I always felt that slides were the precursor to re-photography for print production in books or mags and C-prints for exhibition.

 

[Bolo Kukus]

I certainly have a few hard drives that I have removed from their caddies or cases because the computer or external drive case they were in failed. These are sitting in my desk draaw waiting....................I wonder what images are stored on these drives and plan (one day) to buy a dual bay docking station to check them out- these docking stations allow a "naked" 2.5 or 3.5 inch drive to be mounted and hopefully be read. I recognize though that some drives may be physically faulty with unrecoverable data or require special recovery software to be recognized and read. Hence, I am in two minds about it. Having said all of this, the thing that is causing me to want to do it more than I had before is that recently I have been using some online AI options to repair old, technically limited and frankly "sh#tty" image files and in general have had great success with it. If I can get at some of these old files that are technically poor but with otherwise interesting photos, then this is a definite incentive to try togive it a go.

Here in Indonesia, I can buy a small 'box' from a company called Corica, sold online for about AUD $8. It's an easy job to slide open this box and insert an old hard disk. The box (it comes with a connecting cord) can then be plugged into a laptop (Windows only) and often as not zip! the contents are accessible and easily retrieved IF the hard disk is still working. So far, thanks be to the gods, all mine have been good. I have about 6 of these boxes at home here.

I don't use my old disks for storing anything valuable. Okay for backups and work copies I want to keep. All my good stuff goes on new Western Digital portable disks.

These Corica boxes may be the 'docking station' you mentioned, but I've not heard them called that here.

I don't recall if they are sold in AUS, but then everything is. Ebay should be of help.

 

[Bolo Kukus]

The only problem with that strategy is the assumption that someone will have the player for that format in 50-100 years.

Old computer gear and old software can last a long time.

I have (or rather had, please read on) at home an old 1980s IBM PC, acquired as a freebie from a client company in Melbourne after a work project I did for them in 1990-1991.

This ancient machine stayed in a storage box in our garages in Victoria, then Tasmania, and again Victoria. It survived wo interstate moves.

Last year our local council discovered a box of old floppy disks (remember those?) they'd had stashed in a locker for some 40 years. Unmarked, so nobody knew what was on them.

Our councillor asked to borrow our PC and I was happy to let them have it. After a good leaning (which included the removal of a few dead roaches in the main box), it fired up and their IT wizard did all the usual tests. They are now using it to sequentially read and back up any relevant information on the disks, which it seems covered many important meetings held during that long ago era.

At home now I no longer have any important documents on the few floppies still in one of my storage boxes, and I never did use it to do anything photographic. So if the council wants to keep it as a sort of relic of a bygone age, I will be happy to donate it for their use, or even for community use, as long as some game-crazed freak doesn't bash it to oblivion while playing Tetris on it.

It's good that such old computer gear could be of some use in Century 21. The software it holds is one of the very early IBM DOS programs, a Lotus package, a Wordperfect 4.0 and a few odd games like Tetris, which would make it a relic from the Jurassic age...