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If it wasn't for the family of the deceased, I would say you have some issues... In this case I only can salute you...
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge". Stephen Hawking, 1942- 2018
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And I just found them!
I've copied them onto my computer, and I'm trying to rescue the rest now just in case - but that's complicated because the computer is XP 32 bit, and I can't get AOMEI to work on it, it gives me CRC errors and stops copying, it doesnt like my 256Gb USB stick, and I don't want to turn it off because there is a good chance the HDD may never work again if I do...
Ah, the fun we have on a Sunday!
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Prepare a clean room, get an identical drive on fleabay and then swap the media.
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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Why don't you use an old Hiren's boot // BartPE or similars from that time?
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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For some reason it seems you're spending every single weekend making back-ups, restoring back-ups, looking for files on old back-ups...
I don't think there's anyone more obsessed with his back-ups than you are.
I'd almost think you're some weird back-up fetishist... Are you?
"Oh yeah baby, I'm plugging it in and see if I can restore some of those old files" 
Anyway, have fun I guess.
Also, condolences on your friend 
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I am a little OCD where backups are concerned, yes ... 
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Reminds me...
I was grumbling to my boss one day about lost work after a power outage. I had typed alot but not Saved recently.
The boss replied, "You know what the Bible says about this?"
Me: "No, what?"
Him: "Jesus Saves, you should do the same."
Likely, the almighty would be a fan of frequent back-ups too.
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Maybe I am a little too obsessed - now I've got the files I want off, I've got it to run as a USB disk attached to my "real" PC, and guess what I'm doing? Yes, that's right! A backup of it! 
Don't think it'll work though - it's got 3GB backed up and it's making some very nasty noises.
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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I stand corrected. You HAVE issues!
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge". Stephen Hawking, 1942- 2018
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It's taken me one afternoon and the following morning to find this crap - I'm not losing it again! 
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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"Hi, my name is Griff and I'm a back-upper."
"Hi Griff, welcome to back-uppers anonymous."
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Do they have a 12 step plan?
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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They have full, incremental, and differential plans.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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Griff,
I agree with you. One can't be too thin, one can't be too rich, and one can never, ever have too many backups! No Joking, I am serious.
What you need is a an index of what is stored on each device. Please send me a copy after you have written one.
I had a copy of my signature line but I lost it.
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Ed Aymami wrote: Please send me a copy after you have written one.
 Upvoted.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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Fascinating!
Quote: For over a decade, magnetic tapes from the 1976 Viking Mars landing were unprocessed. When later analyzed, the data was unreadable as it was in an unknown format and the original programmers had either died or left NASA.
The difficult we do right away...
...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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Quote: Fascinating!
Assuming the data is not crypted, how hard it would be to Interpret it? 
It does not solve my Problem, but it answers my question
modified 19-Jan-21 21:04pm.
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Probably quite hard. Remember that back then, space was at a premium, and bandwidth from Viking to Earth was pretty low - so as much as possible was compacted into as small a space as possible. Almost certainly, there is error correction stuff in there as well, and you have no real idea what is being stored there - if you did you wouldn't need to send it in the first place.
So you have no idea what the data is, how it's stored, or anything much at all. Not an easy job.
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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so, e.g. md5 much more developed is nowadays "something" insecure, means "nearly cracked". How can some "error correction" stuff may make a Problem to recognize it... only some minds from my side.
It does not solve my Problem, but it answers my question
modified 19-Jan-21 21:04pm.
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Because if you don't know which is error correction, or even what error correction there was ...
MD5 is a known, published algorithm which makes it a whole lot easier to reverse engineer.
Imagine you have a small executable file, but you don't know what it does, or what processor it was compiled for. And it might use EBCDIC, it might use ASCII, it could be English, it could be Katakana.
Now write the emulator that runs it!
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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They should release the data into a group of enthusiasts like ours.
With a co-operative effort I reckon it will be decoded
Live long and prosper
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I participated in a few international library projects a few years ago, and encountered two quite different attitudes: One group said, "We must standardize on digital formats so that we all can read everybody's document files fifty and hundred years from now", and the other one saying: "Let each library use the formats of their choice! Fifty or hundred years from now, chances are then much higher that there will be readers for at least one of the formats that were used by all the libraries preserving the document".
I am very much in favor of standands, preferably with as few competing alternative standards as possible. Yet I see the arguments for not standardizing but preserving data in a multitude of formats. Too many times I have selected The Ultimate Format for my private files, deciding to convert all my text documents to The Ultimate Text Format, photos to The Ultimate Image Format and so on. It never works. I never get around to convert all my files to The Ultimate before it is no longer The Ultimate. I have even lost access to files that I did convert at some time to The Ultimate, but failed to convert to the next Ultimate while I still had the hardware to do so.
Long time preservation of files requires not just a single format, but a whole stack of standards. It won't help you that the file is PDF/A if you stored it on an 8" floppy. Even if you dig up an 8" floppy unit somewhere, the sectoring may be different: I have a huge pile of floppies with 2048 byte sectors (IBM and most others used 128 byte). So you write a driver that can read the huge sectors, making a disk image file on a modern PC. But the file system is neither MS-DOS, NTFS nor any Unix-family file system: Disk sectors are organized in an "unknown" way. I happen to know it - I know all the details of the Sintran file system, but not very many people do, nowadays. So I can write an extractor to select, in the right order, those sectors making up, say, a PDF/A file.
This is a simple case, when you know the format, which is well defined. There may be more layers. Once I was consulted by a company who needed to retrieve some information in unknown format from some floppies - I could extract the files, but they looked pure gibberish, not readable text. I noticed that some characters were more frequent than others, which gave away one secret: The text was not ASCII characters, but EBCDIC (i.e. IBM's old character code - which existed in umpteen variants, analogous to DOS "code pages"). What I got out was a lot of small text fragments that did not make up a coherent text, and then some seeemingly binary information. Yet, knowing that the text was IBM format, we could start searching for which types of IBM machines had been used by the company in former times, and found one that stored the data using a fairly simple DBMS - so simple that it was easier to read the format specs for the DBMS and write a small program to interpret the data structures, than to get hold of an anitique IBM machine to run it. But if I hadn't had access to the specs for the data structures, I would have been lost.
This is more like the typical case. I am sure that if the information had been available in eight or ten different formats, at least one of them would have been more easily accessible.
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Maybe this is a little depressing (yes, it is!): I have the opposite problem.
I have been preserving lots of stuff: Letters and other stuff I have written and received, many thousand photos, videos and movies from the Super-8 age converted to digital video, sound recordings from when I was a boy myself, from when I was a father, from lots of stuff...
And I realize that the day I say goodbye, it will all go directly to the dump. Noone cares. They do not even watch the videos for being polite, but raise up to make a can of coffee while waiting for the movie to complete. Or, if it is something more recent, they argue like "Well, I was there, I remember it well without the photos", and start chatting with someone else.
Photos and smartphone videos are for laughing at what you did at the party last weekend. Or to display your social, cultural or sports achievements last weekend. Once it has been displayed in your Facebook page and seen by your Facebook friends the same day, it has served its purpose. Of course it will reside in your FB profile "forever", but noone cares to look at it again; they've seen it before, and there are thousands of more recent, more relevant pictures.
I have lost a few files because I didn't get around to convert them until it waw too late. But I know that noone will feel the loss. Noone would ever ask for them. Noone ever asks for that kind of memories.
With one exception: People even older than myself. A few of them, at least. I made a video from a social gathering of mostly retired people and gave them each a copy - they more than say thank you, they even later commented on the "documentary". Younger people would have said "Naaah... I do not use DVDs any more, but if you can put it on YouTube, I might have a look". Then I nod, forget about YouTube, and the youngsters never ask me about it again. They didn't fail to find it, they never tried to find it on YouTube.
So why don't I just dump my entire archive now, relieving those coming after me from the work. Might as well.
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Member 7989122 wrote: So why don't I just dump my entire archive now, relieving those coming after me from the work. Might as well.
Your ungrateful relatives won't care, but future Doctoral candidates in archaeology will. Please don't deprive them of their subject matter!
I took over managing the family tree from my mother, expanding it quite a bit into the past and adding much detail, and have a 13-year-old daughter who's showing interest in it. We'll see how long this lasts, when she realizes the amount of work involved. 
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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