What do I do with dead media and old discs?
I’m not sure you’d be crazy to save the 5-1/4″ disks. They’re sort of in the same boat as records: tons of people have probably never even seen one. As far as getting stuff off of old hard drives, I saw a neat device that has USB on one end, and an IDE ribbon cable on the other. (Here’s one, and another. I’ve never tried either, FWIW.) If you’re never going to access the data and it’s on outdated media (ie, not a 200 GB hard drive you could re-use), I vote for just chucking the unimportant stuff. If you’re feeling ambitious, though, you could probably copy it all over.
I use All Image to backup floppies that are software before pitching said floppies. Push everything up to MAM-A (used to be Mitsui) Gold Archive CDs and DVDs. I’m getting rid of about three hundred floppies that way. You can use par2 files if you’re really concerned about data integrity. I’ll be moving those CDs and DVDs up to Blu-Ray or HD-DVD, whichever wins the format wars eventually. Come up with a good way to structure your data that is reasonable for you. I tend to dump a lot of things by the job I worked, for example.
If you have any desire to hold on to the data, find the means to transfer them to a DVD (or other high-capacity storage media) for longer-term storage. Copy this DVD every few years to ensure the DVD remains uncorrupt. However, if the thought of the effort required to do so scares you, take it as a sign to throw them away. Of course, make sure that you won’t need this data in the future. Don’t know if you’ll need it or not? Transfer onto a DVD. It’s not like they take up a lot of space or money.
