I’m sitting here today copying my giant stack of ancient backup CD/DVDs to SSD. Some of these CDs date back to when CDs were invented — here’s one from 1992, from the old NEC CDR-83 I had on my 386/40 which had 20 megs of ram and used a Future Domain 1680 SCSI adapter…
And they still work!
But I’m tired of lugging them around, and eventually there won’t be any way to read them.
For example; I still have some stuff from my Atari days, and a box of mementos from my decade with Amiga… Some day I’ll find a way to pull all of that old stuff into a new format for my personal museum, but currently it’s all locked into formats that cannot be read.
Over the weekend I DoD wiped the big collection of external drives I’ve had floating around forever… Like an old TowerStor that uses Firewire 400, an antique 2-bay NAS drive from when when NAS drives were the new hotness, and two 5-bay SansDigital eSATA towers full of 750G Caviar Black drives…
It’s been an adventure trying to get adapter cards that haven’t seen use since the Y2K bug to work — but so far so good. You can always count on the Linux community to keep a candle burning for antique hardware. 🙂
I’m also down-sizing my furniture and a lot of the extracurricular cruft I’ve accumulated, and expect to be back down to a single car trip to move myself by the end of 2019.
I’ll still have all of my original inked artwork from back when I did art, and a rather large collection of collectibles from five decades of conventions… And all of my character stuff for my stories and RP settings too… But, in general, if I’ve not touched it since I moved into the condo a year and a half ago — it’s going away.
And that’s one of my New Years resolutions — downsize!