For a long time I was a big fan of Dantz Retrospect Backup. For while I was so committed that I would do an incremental backup of my laptop and most every other computer in my house every day, but I’ve been using it one way or another since 1999 or 2000 or so. All those backups have added up, and they’ve even saved me a couple times. I wish, of course, that I’d been using it previously, when my laptop was stolen in 1995, or when my hard drive failed catastrophically in 1997.

Now however, Dantz has been bought by EMC and merged into a Frankencompany that appears to have no interest in maintaining their Mac products. ComputerWorld has some ideas about how I can do backups going forward, and Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard promises to have a pretty sweet looking backup solution built-in. But, like Mark Pilgrim, I’m worried about how I’m going to be able to access the years of data archived away on those old Retrospect-formatted CDs and DVDs.

The problem is that, for a time, I was happy to delete stuff, knowing that I had a good backup on CD or DVD. So how will I be able to get those files back? How will I be able to go back into the digital shoebox and explore my past as I once did with photos — often still in their one-hour processing envelope with negatives?

archive, backup, backup software, dantz, dantz retrospect, digital preservation, emc, emc insignia, mac, preservation, retrospect

I went looking for an old file the other day. As it turns out, the file was from 12 years ago, but that doesn’t seem so long ago now.

Anyway, I was amused to find how most of my images from that time were TIFFs instead of JPEGs. Thankfully, TIFFs are well supported now, but my old PageMaker files are largely useless to me. And while I was looking at these files from so long ago I found my really bad music from the day. It’s all in Passport Trax sequencer files, which wouldn’t be so bad since it appears that there’s a somewhat-current app that could read them — a screenshot shows it running in OS X. That is, it wouldn’t be so bad if the files weren’t compressed with DiskDoubler, a compression app also from so many years ago. Suddenly I was thankful that I had Classic on my machine and for this blog post that tipped me to ye old DD Expand, still available from the Info-Mac HyperArchive.

In short, I lucked out. My CDR was readable, the files retrievable. I found apps that could open most of them; only my laziness is preventing me from finding a PageMaker install disc, but those MIDI sequencer files might be more difficult. They were written in the days before General MIDI, so I’ll have to find the old synthesizers and a MIDI interface before they’ll be music again.

I wonder if it would be easier to get my old Fantavision animations playing again.

tags: aldus pagemaker, digital preservation, images, jpeg, midi sequencer, old software, preservation, tiff