Preservation of correspondence

[Chuck Guzis]

On 5 Feb 2007 at 10:46, David Cantrell wrote:

> Surely the big "problem" is that people don't think keeping copies of
> all the letters they write to their mum is worth bothering with.  And
> they are entirely correct.

Perhaps, but you're also assuming that one's judgement of things 
important is exactly correct.  The interesting thing about floppies 
is that it's easier to save the used ones than to cull them.

When one migrates hard disk data, the tendency that I've witnessed is 
for users to make decisions about what to transfer.  The case is 
usually that an operating system is also being upgraded and selective 
copying is necessary, as old applications will cease to work without 
all parts (registry, dlls, etc.) being copied--assuming that the 
application will run at all on the new OS.

When I perform migration for friends, I take the old hard drive and 
mount it, unconnected in the new box if possible, just in case the 
original judgement was wrong.  But that will preserve things only as 
long as the owner keeps the box around.  For some reason, the current 
trend is to wipe or destroy hard disks rather than to remove them 
from equipment and encourage the owner to put them in a safe place.

I sometimes wish that I'd have kept all of the BBS-hosted email that 
I exchanged with folks like Don Maslin.  But it didn't seem important 
at the time--and it was on hard disk anyway..

Cheers,
Chuck