Quote:
Originally Posted by CRussel
In other words, your author values her/his work so little that s/he didn't even have a backup???!!!
Seriously? I have my book files backed up to a standalone disk, a local server, and have a third copy in the cloud. And the local server is separately backed up to the cloud AND a local backup disk. Are you kidding? This is my intellectual property, and there is NO F***ing way I'm not covering my posterior every which way but Sunday. I started writing books in 1990 or 1991, and I have every book file I've ever created. Now the fun part would be to come up with an application to READ those files these days. (First word processor was PCWrite, followed by Word Imperfect, and then when forced by circumstance and the publishers, Word.) The WP files could probably be read and mangled by Word, but recovery of the PCWrite files would be a good deal more annoying. The main files were ASCII text, but there were embedded control characters for some formatting features that would be a bit work to have to sort.
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Converting formats was the way I paid for my hobby for quite a few years. One that really sticks in my mind involved 8" floppy disks from a late 1970s era word processor from ADDS. That was a fun conversion job since just reading the floppies called for writing a routine that could read the disk, display the directory and save files to to another disk -- who needs a standard format when we can invent our own? Old IBM EBCDIC 8" floppies and you no longer had the original system and need the content on 5.25" MSDOS floppies? Northstar hard sectored 5.25" floppies with content created by NorthWord that you now need on 3.5" floppies for your Compaq?
Speaking from the years I've spent in IT and electronics before that, very few people will do backups until they learn the hard way. It's just too much bother for no real payback until the first time your computer goes "Hard drive? I don't see no stinkin' hard drive". That seems to be motivation needed to convince most people to start using proper backups.