This year with all the time at home and the clean up that is occurring. I have worked a little bit on archiving older files and managing my backups a little bit better. Yesterday —- I finally broke down and ordered an external Blu-ray drive to check the files on a bunch of discs sitting in front of me for archival purposes. When I built my latest Corsair Air 740 ATX cube based computer build I had sworn off external media. That worked out well enough for a pretty long period of time, but now with all the cleaning and archive checking it became necessary to review stacks and stacks of older media. To do that I had grabbed an external LG DVD drive that helped me check all of the older content. During the heights of my backup efforts it was on DVD and I made a lot of them throughout the course of weekly backup cycles. Literally you can flip across page after storage binder page of backup files. On the brighter side of things the later ones pretty much contained everything in their predecessors so pulling files off of them was about just finding the last one and hoping the disc still worked.
At some point, I’m probably going to have to boot up my older computer downstairs to check the files on these floppy and FUJIFILM computer product zip disks. I’d be very curious if the zip disks still work. Apparently, the eBay market for Zip drives is still pretty good with them selling for around $50 to $75 dollars for one in a box. My Zip drive happens to be located in the bay of my Lian Li computer case in the basement. It needs an IDE cable to work and my ASUS TUF X299 Mark 1 motherboard does not have an IDE connection slot. I would need to buy either an internal IDE hard drive or an external Zip drive. Now that I’m thinking about the problem it is entirely possible that I have a Zip drive in the basement in a box. Later today I’m going to go look and if it cannot be found I’m probably going to try to boot up that old computer off a USB stick with Ubuntu running on it instead of spending any money. That seems like a more reasonable course of action and it could be fun given that it would allow me to check on the 8 actual IBM formatted 1.44 MB disk drives on my desk. I’m pretty sure that these discs are completely useless, but given that I have not previously destroyed it seems reasonable to check on them if I’m putting up the old cube.
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