 Oh my FUCKING GOD I finished dumping 99.99% of a very old, damaged, backup CDROM that was previously unreadable. It took 3 days and I was super excited to find out what old data I put on it. The disc had UDF sessions, because that was common at the time for just Adding Files to non-rewritable media. So I mount that shit in my Windows 98SE box, and lo and behold, this is all that was on it. I would be absolutely upset if it wasn't so fucking funny 90 comments
 @mos_8502 The media certainly was from that early era hahah I was all excited to see what young me archived on their Win98 box back then. Will I find my old midi collection? Some old VB4 source code? Old websites I made? Instead I got fucking shrek'd, and as a stupid mpeg layer 2 file. 10/10 @mr_daemon Backups are hard. Your choice seems to be between unreliable optical media that’s cheap or insanely expensive LTO drives that you can actually rely on. @mr_daemon Yeah. I would have to buy two drives and store one in hopes that it survives. @mos_8502 @mr_daemon Unfortunately if it has any rubber parts (belts, rollers, etc.) those are likely to perish unless they are sealed in an oxygen-free atmosphere, eg. a jar flushed with CO2 or N2 or Ar.  @mr_daemon @mos_8502@studio8502.ca I still have my working QIC-40 drive and software but due to belt routing inside the tapes, I have my work cut out for me before I can restore my BBS backup from 1993.  @mr_daemon @mos_8502 we researched the other day whether we could use a tiny wine fridge as a climate control device for tapes... we concluded that we cannot. the small ones are based on Peltiers not compressors, so any cooling is minimal, and regardless of size they don't seal the air and do nothing for humidity @mr_daemon @mos_8502 it would very much be a solution for people who have too much money but not megacorp data center levels of money, anyway. not really ideal. @irenes @mr_daemon best idea I’ve come up with is using those fancy long lasting “M-Disc” BD-R discs in a Blu-Ray burner, and even that is more than I can presently afford. @mos_8502 @irenes Personally at this point i'm banking on ZFS's ability to not have silent corruption and my capacity to maintain the local raidz2 array as well as an off-site mirror of verifiable encrypted blocks. Not everything is `perfectly image-able` however, so this isn't perfect, but it sure beats old media that's 2 solid months away from biodegrading. At least I can check integrity of it at will, and have multiple copies  @irenes Nitrogen or CO2 (via liquid nitrogen or dry ice) is probably the most accessible for the home user. Just need a way to store it with really good seals too. @SiteRelEnby yeah.... well, CO2 is safer in that there's less asphyxiation risk, but neither thrills us. really humidity control is the big thing we think. @SiteRelEnby yeah... a long time ago we stored backups in AWS glacier. it was at a period in our life before we achieved financial stability, and at one point we were unable to pay the bill for a few months. we're sure the backups still physically exist (destroying them would cost money), but for practical purposes they are now permanently irretrievable. @SiteRelEnby also the originals they were backups of were destroyed during that same period, for reasons that shared a cause with it, so it's "real" data loss for us. @SiteRelEnby also over the next few years we're intending to accumulate, like, web scrapes and things of similar size, and even just the transfer cost for that would be prohibitive, so that's why we've been looking into very-high-volume removable media for our cold storage. @SiteRelEnby but yeah tier 1 is definitely going to be a RAID connected by SAN to our servers that we're going to have at some point, heh :)  @irenes @mr_daemon @mos_8502 the worse thing with that sort of thing is the peltier really lends itself to very very tight temperature control and none of them have it, at all. Now, at the lab equipment price point, sure, you can get that there! @beige_alert @mr_daemon @mos_8502 yeah absolutely. the products seem to be aimed at people with more money than scientific knowledge to evaluate whether it's doing anything useful >< @beige_alert @mr_daemon @mos_8502 that's kind of a recurring theme that we see across a long list of product categories and a large span of time products that claim to do something useful but if you understand the proposed mechanism, it's clear that they can't do that thing. if you don't, it sounds sufficiently science-ish that you might buy it........... @mos_8502 @mr_daemon Multiple copies of optical data, with error recovery sections.  I mean yeah it's Shrek alright. I am dumping a second CDROM of the same kind, and it better not contain `Shrek {Part 3}.mpg` 𝄞𝄞𝄞 I was lookin' kinda dumb running nero off a thumb drive that I got for free at a trade show. @mr_daemon Maybe it'll contain some Winamp skins, because what are you doing with that basic "classic" look, huh? 🦙 @one_suit_samus At this point I like to think of classic skin as _vintage_ instead of basic.  @mr_daemon hey! I have a similar situation with a badly damaged CD that I’d like to recover. What software did you use? Did you try any surface cleaning methods? Thaaaanks! @fumoh A gentle cleaning + ddrescue in direct mode, multiple passes with the mapfile to keep track of which blocks were read vs not did most of the heavy lifting. Piece of clear tape over a particularily damaged area on the label side that flaked the reflective material got it up to 99.99%, and after 3 days, I decided that was as good as it was gonna get. I could have tried it in a different drive, too  @cairobraga @fumoh no, just a piece of shit TTSTcorp USB dvd writer thats the price of a fancy sandwich. To be fair it's been great value for the cost. @mr_daemon @fumoh very interesting! I have a couple of CDs with a label side starting to flake. I thought that the data is there and flaking is permanent damage. Interesting to hear that its just a reflective layer. I will try the trick with a piece of clear tape. :)   @mr_daemon So much culture and history that it couldn't fit on a single CD-ROM. :shrek:   at first I was like "no way this wasn't a manufactured situation" and the I was like "no, it probably happened, I would do the same thing" @james I genuinely have no memory of ever writing this to disc as a teenager. The format also implies I made a new session to overwrite the previous stuff, too, just to store this. It is the equivalent of finding a VHS with an old show you liked to watch, only to discover you recorded half of a crappy TV movie in the middle, with the ads. We don’t know each other, but I’m very proud of you. Your priorities back then were admirable. Long live Shrek.  but at least you get to listen to... ... I thought love was only true in fairy tales 🎶 So I mean, at least there is that 😄  @mr_daemon You try and tell kids these days about that and... they literally don't know wtf you're talking about and can't be expected to stay still for the many layers of explanation that would be necessary to explain. :)  @Snowshadow The disc was REALLY beat up, the media was flaking, it had dark spots, was scratched to shit and had see through holes in it lol. It was literally stored in a box in my closet, loose, next to t he water heater. Extracting the readable bits off such discs can take a long while lol All of this effort to get half a shrek "...half a shrek" LOL. @Snowshadow Yes that's the insulting part, like the whole shrek 1 in shitty mpg quality didn't fit on one single 650mb disc, so it was split into two separate files. This is the second. No idea where the first went, so not only is shrek, but it's also useless shrek 10/10 outcome  @mr_daemon 👏🏽👏🏽if anything digital archival has taught me is that obscure titles like this are always at risk of being lost.  @mr_daemon since you mentioned UDF sessions, did you check if there was anything else that got "deleted" before?
altho *just* shrek is mighty funny too   @mr_daemon I love that quote; life is like a box of onions, it makes you cry, - great movie  @mr_daemon Please tell me that's a W98SE VM. Or, failing that, at least air-gapped from the internet. @dan131riley Don't worry, I put pants on before leaving the house -- it's 86box with a hardware configuration that is more or less a composite of computers I used to own back then. It also goes through a homebrew proxy that routes through the internet archive so you can also pretend it's really 1997 with Netscape Navigator and all.    @esoteric_programmer Basically, instead of constructing an iso9660 format image and index once and wirting that, most early CD writing software used a form of packet writing with UDF (Universal DIsk Format), through sessions left open, so you could keep appending new data without having to rewrite the entire thing. It was common enough that the resulting volume would present a small iso9660 volume with the UDF support drivers and software so it could be read on earlier systems. @mr_daemon very, very interesting that. I remember that cds, once written, either couldn't be rewritten at all, or could but the whole thing had to go at once. Sure, I was using linux for that at the time, the same as I was doing now, but yeah, TIL  |
Gregory's Server
@mr_daemon love the (D:) looking like a shocked sad face on the left of that screenshot. Really completes it lol