Re: film vs. digital survival of the hurricane
- From: "-hh" <recscuba_google@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 16 Sep 2005 07:06:45 -0700
Mark² (lowest even number here) wrote:
> wilt wrote:
> > <<What will save the formats, in my opinion, is the need for
> > historical/documentary continuity.>>
> >
> > Hmm, I posted on the issue of digital image longevity a few months
> > ago!
I've made comments on the subject as well.
> > Historical preservation will keep 'important' photos alive...political
> > leaders, major news events, etc. But just how will our descendants be
> > able to pull of a digital photo of 'great grandma'..."Honey, have you
> > heard of any way to read these old CD-R thingamajigs?"
>
> That isn't what I addressed.
Unfortunately, no file exists without some form of media and some form
of format. If either is lost, you lose the data.
> I addressed the issue of image formats, such as tiff and jpeg.
>
> Everyone has the responsibility of archiving their data as technology
> changes.
Which is why "important" stuff will have the labor invested to 'save'
it, but its the individual family's shoebox photos that will be lost.
> Anyone who thinks CDs are the way to do this are kidding themselves.
True, but that's simply cherrypicking at the worst elements of the much
bigger problem.
> The good news?? -With each new technology, people will be able to archive
> in much larger chunks (meaning faster archiving/copying), and also the
> easier ability to create redundancy.
True, but its still only *part* of the overall process.
For example, here's a link to my huntzinger.com website where I'm now
keeping a graphical image file that I did for work in 1992 that I did
very faithfully keep migrating forward onto each new computer's hard
drive...and yet it perfectly illustrates this problem:
http://tinyurl.com/cl5s4
Since you'll have problems opening the file, the first hint in
recovering this data is that it was originally created by a mainstream
professional application of its day in 1992.
The second hint is the specific application, which is provided below
after a handful of line breaks for those who want to try first before
seeing the first spoiler hint:
The file format is Microsoft's Powerpoint v2 for Macintosh. Yes, this
explains the lack of a .PPT file ending.
The third and final hint is how to actually successfully open the file,
since I've had to go figure it out because there was an actual business
need to revisit this report summary a decade after its release.
Again, several linebreaks for those who want to try before seeing the
spoiler:
Solution: Now that you know its a Powerpoint file, you've probably
tried to open it in whatever current version of PPT that you're
running, and it didn't work. It turns out that Microsoft quietly drops
backwards compatibility to their old PPT formats in newer versions of
PPT. To retreive this PPT v2 file, you need a copy of Powerpoint v4
(vintage 1997), as it was the last version that supported the v2 file
format. Once you have it saved as v4, most of the current versions of
Powerpoint will open it.
And so, not only was it a pain to recover this file because we didn't
realize that we needed to do a 'Quality Check' as new versions of the
Applications came along for the past 13 years (instead of merely
copying files), but you'll see that it looks pretty ugly, since one of
the 'backwards compatible' file translations was not 100% faithful.
Author Clifford Stohll was right...there be Snake Oil.
-hh
.
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