CA Fire damages HP historical Documents

[falcon]

Link: Engadget Story
Very little detail, I haven't found an official announcement by HP.

[smp]

This link was posted over on the VCF:

http://www.pressdemocrat.com/business/75...artslide=0

Very sad news, indeed!

smp

[pier4r]

Very sad. Once again contributions and memories lost.

[Eric Rechlin]

I really hope somebody scanned them all before they were lost forever.

That's something I'm working on now. Thanks to a fellow HP fan providing me with a slide scanner, I've been scanning old color slides from my family, many of them over 60 years old. I've scanned about 1365 of them so far, with at least as many still left to do, just to ensure an extra record of them is maintained in case the originals are lost.

[EugeneNine]

One would think a company like HP would have access to a scanner.

I've scanned all my old pictures and notes back from college and high school (back to 1989). I need to get some old photo albums from my parents and get those scanned someday.

[pier4r]

careful though. Digital data is great to make copies but it is hard to let it survive if one is not disciplined.

One needs backup on new hardware when the hardware change.
One needs to backup software that was able to read certain formats.
One needs to backup the OS that was able to run the software.
If needed, a backup of hardware parts to run the OS.

One should test the data every now and then to avoid data corruption.
Etc.

Time is long and everything can happen.

One solution is to stick with formats that are likely to be always supported, like plain text. Plain text plus markup language (documented) in another case.

Printing on paper or microfilm and making several copies in different locations would help alongside digital files.

[Garth Wilson]

Keeping a good system of regular backups, kept in different places, is not difficult, but most individuals are not very diligent about it. I imagine most companies do better. Here at the house, our son set up a server in the garage which is in a separate building with 30' of separation between buildings. The server backs up the computers in the house every day, and backs up it primary hard disc to a secondary one. Then he occasionally also backs it up to yet another one in his room which is in the opposite end of the house from my office. My website is hosted thousands of miles away on a virtual server, and the server in the garage backs that up daily too. Fire, theft, of other problem is pretty unlikely to cost us more than a day's data.

[jebem]

I believe the most advanced civilizations are the ones to lose all their information in first place when a disaster occurs. The more advanced technologies used, the worst, because less evidence is left after a disaster (think Spet-11).

On the other hand, a ancient civilization that wrote its knowledge on stone thousands of years ago can still be accessed and can resist to time and most catastrophic events.

A few years back a customer of mine had a datacenter disaster (a fire) and lost everything.
Literally all the storage systems were lost and the valuable backups lost as well because it were stored in the same computer room.

We know too well that most companies do not have proved/effective disaster recovery plans for all their information. Only the really critical data is secured and this only happens for enterprise companies.


I like the convenience of having my photo albums on paper (or slides that requires a basic machine to be displayed).

A fire/flood will destroy paper, yes, but also it will destroy any technological device used to store our information.
It is basically the same problem, no matter what kind of physical media support we use.

I believe one solution would be a distributed/replicated file system over servers located around the world, where we can safely store our digitized valuable assets. This technology is available from cloud suppliers for end users, some even offer storage for free, but again:
- Can we trust them to have 100% availability?
- Can we trust them in the long term?
- Can this technology resist all kind of malicious attacks?

[pier4r]

(10-31-2017 08:35 AM)Garth Wilson Wrote:  Keeping a good system of regular backups, kept in different places, is not difficult, but most individuals are not very diligent about it. I imagine most companies do better. Here at the house, our son set up a server in the garage which is in a separate building with 30' of separation between buildings. The server backs up the computers in the house every day, and backs up it primary hard disc to a secondary one. Then he occasionally also backs it up to yet another one in his room which is in the opposite end of the house from my office. My website is hosted thousands of miles away on a virtual server, and the server in the garage backs that up daily too. Fire, theft, of other problem is pretty unlikely to cost us more than a day's data.

Exactly. The point is that one has to be prepared to make this effort and even companies are not that happy to do it. (consider that every now and then your son will have to upgrade the hardware)

Also another thing that is underestimated (be me too) is to check the consistency of the backup, because data corruption may happen so better to know that it happened as soon as possible than too late. (your son may employ md5 checks done from time to time)

I don't remember whether Eric or Joe reported that old messages in the hp48 newsgroup contain RPL code that was compressed for web upload with a certain software. That software is not anymore available, now that compressed code is almost (until someone finds a solution) useless.

edit: also jebem has very good points.

[toml_12953]

(10-31-2017 10:13 AM)jebem Wrote:  I believe the most advanced civilizations are the ones to lose all their information in first place when a disaster occurs. The more advanced technologies used, the worst, because less evidence is left after a disaster (think Spet-11).

The burning of library at Alexandria was one example of the loss of much knowledge. The information was stored on papyrus scrolls. Such a pity whenever and wherever it happens.

[Eric Rechlin]

(10-31-2017 10:37 AM)pier4r Wrote:  I don't remember whether Eric or Joe reported that old messages in the hp48 newsgroup contain RPL code that was compressed for web upload with a certain software. That software is not anymore available, now that compressed code is almost (until someone finds a solution) useless.

Not for web upload, but to survive Usenet propagation. These messages predated the web. And the software tools to decode them are still available today, though hard to find; depending on the tool I was able to decode them either under Linux/Unix (I used Microsoft's WSL on Windows 10) or in DOSBox. So nothing became useless.

[BobVA]

The current XKCD comic seem relevant. (Don't miss the "mouse-over" comment!)

[revwillie]

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technolo...ate=103117

Sad day.
Incidentally, I'm running backups right now.

[EugeneNine]

(10-31-2017 08:17 AM)pier4r Wrote:  careful though. Digital data is great to make copies but it is hard to let it survive if one is not disciplined.

One needs backup on new hardware when the hardware change.
One needs to backup software that was able to read certain formats.
One needs to backup the OS that was able to run the software.
If needed, a backup of hardware parts to run the OS.

One should test the data every now and then to avoid data corruption.
Etc.

Time is long and everything can happen.

One solution is to stick with formats that are likely to be always supported, like plain text. Plain text plus markup language (documented) in another case.

Printing on paper or microfilm and making several copies in different locations would help alongside digital files.

I'm very careful to always use open formats and open source OS's as much as possible. Learned that lesson the hard way, never trust a company like microsoft to store your data.

I make sure I always have more than one system working such as my laptop, server, a couple raspberry pi's, phone, tablet. Then I run my own sync system (owncloud) so the primary data is copied to all those devices so should one die, get lost, stolen, etc I always have multiple up to date copies. Then secondary data on the main server and offline backups on more than one media type. Lastly file formats that can be read on anything such as opendocument or tiff.

[Eddie W. Shore]

(10-30-2017 02:44 PM)falcon Wrote:  Link: Engadget Story
Very little detail, I haven't found an official announcement by HP.

This is very sad - history lost.