The good ole days- Take 2 February 2, 2010
Posted by joedob in personal.trackback
“How much is TOO much?”
With the advent of a new year, I begin to accumulate thoughts, facts, files and stuff deemed revelant to a new beginning. After a prescribed amount of time, in this case 1 month, I’ve stored enough data that I feel compelled to start the unheard of task of “BACKING UP” my stuff. Since I don’t consider too much to be relevant, the quantity of stuff I have is not very large, so backing it up “should” be fairly simple. The operative word in the last thought is “SHOULD”.
For those of you too young, inexperienced, or senile, at one time, the accepted method of backup was a small, plastic device about 3.5 inches square with a magnetic media inside. This device was called a FLOPPY DISK, although it was not very floppy. By today’s standards, the venerable floppy was miniscule, holding a meer 1.44MB of data. By comparison, today’s DVD’s can store over 7GB, or about 5000 times a much stuff.
The reason for the history lesson is that in order to quickly know what’s on the floppy, a label was affixed to the front, & the contents of the disk handwritten on the label. Archaic, I grant you, but functional. So this morning, while at work running our end of month process, I decided to “backup” the 1st month of the new year. Confidently inserting the disk, I successfully copied all my stuff to the floppy and began to search for the aforementioned label. Finding a label was simple. Finding a label that was not so old that the glue hadn’t dried up was was not. I frantically tore apart my office, only to find that I did not have a non-dried up label. The engineering part of my brain kicked into high gear, & the solution became obvious… “SCOTCH TAPE”. I carefully applied said solution to my newly created backup & VOILA!!! IT WORKED.
My pride slowly turned to anguish as I realized that in computers, as in life, the aging process dries up old, unneeded entities, & does not replace them. Is this my fate? Will I dry up & not be replaced? Will my tried & true technology (IBM AS/400) wither away in nothing, & become just an unusable memory to be laughed at? Only time will tell.
Sweet merciful crap dad, buy a CD burner and a set of markers for writing on burnable CDs.
What’s next for your floppy disk back up, shoving it into an overhead vent to hide it?
I’ll do you one better. These days, most government agencies have banned the use of USB sticks due to security concerns. It seems that agents of certain other governments *ahem* were leaving them strewn about facilities our guys are known to frequent in the hopes that somebody would pick one up and plug it into his or her government PC. Unfortunately, it worked like a charm. The USB sticks usually had very exotic, custom, and previously undetected malware on them. The kind that searches through your files for the design specs of the F-35 and quietly transmits them back to the motherland.
So as a result, at least once or twice a day I find myself burning a damn CD to move a 4 to 20 KB text file – usually a script I’m working on – from one non-networked PC to another. A part of me wants to cry every time I do this, but then I just remember how much this practice probably pisses off the tree huggers. And then I smile.
As I told Jay, these files are on my HIGH POWERED DOS based 486, with a hard drive with less capacity than a standard CD. But on the bright side, I don’t get viruses, trojans, or other maleware.