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New externalities
As I prepared to quit my alleged career, I boxed up and discarded close to seven hundred 3.5" floppies, representing at that point about a dozen years’ work product, as I had begun to move to “Zip disks” for archival purposes not long after the mid-nineties. Late in the century I thought that Fujitsu “magneto-optical” discs (note that “disc” appears to be the favored orthography once lasers enter the mix) standard was going to be the wave of the future, but this was when CD-ROM blanks were still selling for about three bucks apiece (once the price dropped to between a nickel and twenty cents, well, today I have a couple of hundred of these boxed up). Later on, when “flash drives” became available, I grabbed these, and probably have fifty or sixty boxed up today, including early 128 MB(!) jobbies I purchased for sums I’d blush to disclose today. I’ve also collected eight or ten external USB hard drives (conventional mechanism) as well as about as many larger non-portable units, and even a few IEEE 1394 “Firewire” drives (a standard promoted and then abandoned by Apple). Most recently, I have collected at least half a dozen external “solid-state” drives, each one with approximately the footprint of a credit card, and jeebus, I still can’t arrive at a rational scheme for my archives. Sheesh!

grinding my virtual fangs,
New Here's the scheme
Maintain your archives on whatever it's on as long as possible. Once it's no longer convenient or cost-effective to maintain your collection, select a standard that's not on the bleeding edge and meets current needs. Convert everything to the new standard as quickly as possible and throw out the old ones.

Let me repeat: and throw out the old ones. Anything else is madness. (Says the guy whose wife just told him to do something with the box of electronics in the basement.)
--

Drew
New Good advice.
I've got a bunch of hard drives that I've salvaged from various machines over the years. And recently upgraded a Bulldozer machine with a couple of 2TB hard drives.

Those new HDs now have the click of death. :-/

I've got a bunch of CDs as well, some of which can no longer be read (scratches, etc.)

One can get a 2TB Crucial SATA SSD drive for about $200. They're reasonably fast in an external USB3 enclosure/dock. While they don't last forever, they're much, much more reliable than spinning platters, and take up a lot less space. (I've not seen an SATA SSD fail yet, I don't think.)

When I get some time™, one of my next major jobs is to finally get everything useful backed up off the old media and onto an SSD and get rid of all the old stuff...

Cheers,
Scott.
New I've got a 3TB USB3 SSD
Problem is every time I start backing stuff up I go through it to see if it's worth keeping.
--

Drew
New BDRW is the archival medium of the moment
Well, the archival medium of the moment that won't run you hundreds of dollars for the drive and twenty bucks a pop for the media.
New As linus said about 30 years ago.
Real programmers don't backup, they just upload everything to the internet.

In my case I solved the archive issue by having a fire. Problem solved.
New fire sale
I knew a couple who lost their home to the “Oakland Hills Fire” (quite a spectacle that was from down in the flatlands) in 1991. They were vacationing in Nepal at the time, and in this antediluvian era the “word wide web” was but a mewling infant, and the internet was some years away from becoming a mass consumer phenomenon. Also, few people had mobile phones of any kind, and the state-of-the-art that year was costly, and the size of a shoe.

What I’m sayin’ here is that, on the far side of the world, Jeff and Alice weren’t keeping tabs on the news back home. They return on schedule, and their college-age son retrieves them at San Francisco Airport at the appointed time. “Anything happen while we were away?” “Yeah, you might say.”

Looking back on it years later, they observed that while they’d as soon it hadn’t happened, the loss of all their goods and chattels was oddly liberating: “We will never accumulate that much stuff again.” I venture to hope that there was a similar upside for you.

cordially,
New I'm not actively striking matches, but worse things could happen
--

Drew
New Loved that little tale.. it may have helped moi 'disengage' in '17. Rubric: Stuff sucks. Except..
and in that narsty little word: lies the same old, But.. BUT..

{sigh} or is it {{Sheesh!}}
Whither should goest: Near-first? English Eds. of Marx (not Groucho) and Mein Kampff?
     externalities - (rcareaga) - (8)
         Here's the scheme - (drook) - (2)
             Good advice. - (Another Scott) - (1)
                 I've got a 3TB USB3 SSD - (drook)
         BDRW is the archival medium of the moment - (pwhysall)
         As linus said about 30 years ago. - (crazy) - (3)
             fire sale - (rcareaga) - (2)
                 I'm not actively striking matches, but worse things could happen -NT - (drook)
                 Loved that little tale.. it may have helped moi 'disengage' in '17. Rubric: Stuff sucks. Except.. - (Ashton)

It's Microsoft clearly boiling the frogs...
65 ms