This weekend I’m probably going to drag the old Lian Li computer case upstairs and try to boot that computer up. It might be a case where I need to boot from an Ubuntu DVD. That question will be settled when the motherboard is examined to see what types of connections exist. It turns out I found the Iomega zip 250 drive in the basement. It has what looks like a printer cable connection and no USB on the back. Finding out that was a little disappointing. I thought it might be easy enough to plug in the device to my main computer and find out what is on those discs. That adventure will have to wait a little bit.
It seems like going forward it might be prudent to keep a few of these backup storage access devices in a box just in case some older media needs to be accessed. What used to be so easy is now pretty hard when it comes to managing physical media access. I’m willing to bet that is going to keep getting more complex as all of those physical media storage slowly break down over time. The data on the media is for sure slowly breaking down. It is entirely possible that this little pile of disks has nothing on it and the entire effort will have been for nothing. Knowing that is probably worth it. I’m cleaning up all the junk in my storage boxes and that is promising.
I guess my backup storage device plan is going to involve keeping 3 devices in a box: 1) a USB connection floppy drive, 2) a USB external zip 250, and 3) an external USB drive that reads and writes DVD/Blu-ray discs. It is probably prudent to just keep those 3 devices in a box with their relevant power supplies in case this happens again. Somebody asks me to archive stuff about once a year at this point and just keeping those backup devices does not seem like a huge burden. It is only going to get harder and harder to work with this type of media. I’m not sure how much longer the classic USB Type-A connectors are going to be around on devices going forward. They are slowly but surely being replaced with the much superior USB Type-C connectors. They have the distinct advantage of being awesome enough to never be plugged in upside down.
