How Old Is Your Personal Data (Your Data Stream Of Sorts)?

We all accumulate files that are truely irreplaceable, but sometimes we lose them. Those of us smart enough to make backups will keep some (and hopefully all of these files). While my data stream began around 7.25.1997 (yes I do remember, I came home from a friend's birthday when we got our first real PC), I have had at least three major data lossless between then and 2003. Some of the files I have go back to Fall 1997 (due to floppy disks), but the majority originate from after the cataclysm of April 2003, when I misparitioned my HDD and lost all the data. But since then I have a spare HDD and haven't lost any data (at least not on accident) for almost three years. What's the history of your data stream?

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I have files that are from 1997, I just can't remember which. I'd probably know if I looked at them. The only real data loss I had was on my laptop. I had just downloaded about 20 soundtracks in a week. The moment I thought about putting them on a CDR is when the laptop decided to crash. I had an unmountable boot volume error that couldn't be erased without doing a system restore. I'm aobut to run to the store soon and buy some DVD-Rs so I can back up all this music on my HDD now.

How ya doing, buddy?

I still have a tarball containing the contents of my old (long-dead) 486. While the tarball dates to 1999, the contents of that HD hadn't changed really since about 1996.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

I still have files on my current PC that date back to 1995. They are hardly used, though. I've been lucky enough to never have a catastrophic failiure without some backups.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Even though I've had internet access longer than most people here (since 1995, to be exact), most of my files are actually pretty new. Frankly, there wasn't much stuff worth bringing from my old 486 to my newer computers! ^^;

The oldest stuff that I have on my current system would have been transferred from my Pentium III Dell, which I bought in 2001. There might be a few SNES ROMs and other things that I brought from my older 486 and Celeron computers, but they're not really distinguished in any way.

My spare parts bin has more history than my data collection; there's a 1992 Sound Blaster Pro, a couple of ISA video cards, a really V.34 modem that probably cost a fortune when it was new, a Cyrix 5x86/100 in IBM disguise, and the guts of one of those nasty nasty nasty Samsung SHD-series drives, among other things.

the irony in this is that I have a huge amount of old (1980-1997) PC games on my FTP server, but I don't have any files that are that old kicking around anymore; most of those games were nabbed in a handful of torrents sometime last year, or off of HOTU.

I was speaking idiomatically.

I wish I had still had some of my stuff from pre-1996. This would include my first shitty pieces of digital art as well as my first web site on the very, very old GeoCities. That stuff has since been lost, and my oldest files date back circa 1997. I got some pics, some game files, some ROMs, some documents (grade school book reports and science fair stuffs), and very old RealMedia stuff. I've really only had one major loss of data, and that occured in 2003 when I lost about 120 GB of video game music. I actually still haven't recovered everything I lost, especially since I didn't have any listing.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Without turning on my PC, I'd guess my oldest files date back to around 1996 or so. Some stuff I don't have that I wish I still did (like my first crap website, made in Netscape Composer 3, or some old things I made in 4th grade in Word 6 for Windows 3.1), but I've been pretty lucky—I've never had any big, catastrophic data losses despite a long history of computer experimentation (non-destructive re-partitioning my old PCs to try Linux/BeOS being the most dangerous of my non-backed-up activities). Almost THOUGHT I did once, but managed to fix things. Now I back up my PowerBook's home folder every week to an external, but I have no backups for my externals. Just don't have the cash flow to afford a full backup solution yet. But I figure after I graduate and get a real job, that will be fixed.

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1996; old savegame backups from old crappy games I no longer have. I still have my saves though ^_^

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Some of my oldest files are from 1989 and 1990. These had originally been stored on floppy, but I reburned all of my floppy discs onto a CD when I got my first burner sometime in the mid to late '90s. There's nothing I really care about on there anymore .. mostly projects written in Fortran, and some old papers or proposals that I had written.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

I've got a few old oregon trail save games on floppies from 96ish.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

On this computer, I have stuff that dates back to 2004 when I bought the computer. On my other much older one, my data stream dates all the way to 1994. The only real loss I experienced was some goof up I made and it ended in my whole graphic design folder going poof.

How ya doing, buddy?