I've started to publish some of my notes on digital preservation. It's mostly a collection of 'war stories' and summaries of some of the little experiments I've carried out over the years, but never had time to write up properly. The idea of publishing these stories is inspired in part by XFNSTN, but also by my experience co-coordinating the AQuA workshops and from observing the success of the SPRUCEdp project.
In short, I think we need to share more war stories, not just the occasional full research paper, but also the small stuff, and the failures. Maybe I can start the ball rolling by sharing mine. I'd really like to know if anyone else out there is interested in sharing theirs.
There's a couple of bigger items on there that I think might be of particular interest:
- A long-winded data migration story about accessing data from BBC Master floppy disks.
- A description of how bitwise analysis can be used to better understand formats and the tools that act upon them, somewhat related to an OPF blog post by Jay Gattuso earlier this year.
Feedback welcome, as ever.
andy jackson
September 25, 2013 @ 1:04 pm CEST
Perfect, that's exactly the kind of thing I was hoping for. Thank you.
mauricederooij
September 24, 2013 @ 1:15 pm CEST
During the Freiburg Emulation Hackathon in 2012 we failed to revive a bookkeeping application and the data created with it.
The application could not be revived because we did not have the registration key. We failed to read the data because it was in some proprietary format.
A lesson learned here is to keep ALL documentation, keys and any information that might look trivial at the time, it might be invaluable in the future.
http://wiki.opf-labs.org/display/KB/Exact+For+DOS+Bookkeeping+Data+Solution