Ebook RPG Books

[Jürgen Hubert]

I sympathize with your losses. The trick to avoid this is to use popular and open document formats. Plain ASCII text will be with us for a long time. PDFs are so popular that even if they are superseded by another format there will be plenty of solutions available to convert them into different formats.

And data storage has become so absurdly cheap that keeping one's files in multiple backup media is very easy indeed. Especially if you want to store electronic books or text documents, which barely require any memory at all by modern standards.

 

[Scribble]

The most obvious examples would be the stuff I did on my Apple IIe on 5" floppies. Obviously, the tech has come so far that you'd naturally expect the hardware to be obsolete..

Yeah... Hardware kind of goes out all the time. I can't really watch any of my 16mm films now.

It sucks, but that kind of stuff you have to watch out for, and transfer what's important.

In addition, I had a Champions spreadsheet & campaign writeup + some work files done in Microsoft programs that were available for both PCs and Macs (my platform of choice). At one point, Microsoft decided that they were changing the way they were doing both their WP and spreadsheets...which coincided with a Mac OS upgrade that made the older programs malfunction. Being forced to run the new programs wasn't bad- they worked just fine, after all- but the problem was that there was now no way to get the old data.

Do you remember the name of the format?

I guess it just really surprises me because I've never lost something due to a file format change.

 

[jaerdaph]

I have personal computer files- documents, databases, original digital art, etc.- ranging from 20 years old to as young as 5 years old that are lost to me because the programs that created them cannot be run on 99.9% of computers operating in the world. I was fortunate in a few cases to have hard copies of the data, but re-entering that data into a form usable on the computer will be time consuming...

And, of course, past experience has shown me that, in a few years, I may just be facing the same problem again.

The data may be safe & stable, but its stale, obsolete and inaccessible in a way and in a time frame that hard data takes centuries to achieve.

Danny, I recommend contacting Tekserve (Tekserve NYC's Apple Macintosh, iPod, and Accessories Specialist) - an independently owned Apple super store/repair shop/tech support in New York City on West 23rd. The place is *awesome* - they've been around forever (and I believe they still keep some older - much older - Mac systems and software still up and running) and if they can't help you get those files back in a format you can use today, I don't think anyone can. My friends, former co-workers, ex-employers and I have all had great experiences with them. Check out there Web site and give 'em a call - you never know.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Do you remember the name of the format?

I guess it just really surprises me because I've never lost something due to a file format change.

Microsoft Works, as I recall, was the original program, which was discontinued in favor of Microsoft Word and Excel. MS has no translation for the Mac version of Works to Word- not even to the PC version.

I don't remember the name of the compression program I used. Its main claims to fame was that it let you run the programs in compressed form and made making Self-expanding archives a breeze to create. However, when that company went belly up (so there was no update to be had), I tried opening the compressed files with other programs, like Stuffit, but to no avail (not that I was surprised by that).

For those who have suggested possible solutions, I say thank you!

...but you're too late- most of those files & floppies are gone.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

As a footnote to my unintentional threadjack, my family and I are in the middle of upgrading our Macs to a 27" iMac, a 21.5" iMac, and a pair of Mac Minis.

From a pair of G3s, a pair of "Blue Bubble" iMacs...and a 7600. One of the iMacs and the 7600 are from my Dad's business.

That last one is sooooooooo old...

"How old is it?"

Its so old (discontinued in 1996) that the Apple Store doesn't have the cables, connectors or programs to retrieve data from it. Data he needs.

I'm going to have to hook up a Zip drive to it to dump its hard drive, then dump the Zip onto one of the Bubble iMacs so that they can transfer the critical files to a Mac Mini. This may take some time.

Looks like I'm having a fun start to 2010!

 

[Scribble]

Microsoft Works, as I recall, was the original program, which was discontinued in favor of Microsoft Word and Excel. MS has no translation for the Mac version of Works to Word- not even to the PC version.

Its so old (discontinued in 1996) that the Apple Store doesn't have the cables, connectors or programs to retrieve data from it. Data he needs.

Guess it's another reason to add to my list of why I dislike MACs!

(Microsoft works is still around, I guess just not for the mac. )

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

(Microsoft works is still around, I guess just not for the mac. )

Yeah, they discontinued it for Macs, and even though they made Microsoft Word and the various parts of Office all basically platform transparent, they didn't do us that courtesy with Works.

So our Office stuff is still just fine, but Works? [Indeterminate Eastern European Accent]Works is DEAD to us![/Indeterminate Eastern European Accent]

 

[Stormonu]

As a footnote to my unintentional threadjack, my family and I are in the middle of upgrading our Macs to a 27" iMac, a 21.5" iMac, and a pair of Mac Minis.

From a pair of G3s, a pair of "Blue Bubble" iMacs...and a 7600. One of the iMacs and the 7600 are from my Dad's business.

That last one is sooooooooo old...

"How old is it?"

Its so old (discontinued in 1996) that the Apple Store doesn't have the cables, connectors or programs to retrieve data from it. Data he needs.

I'm going to have to hook up a Zip drive to it to dump its hard drive, then dump the Zip onto one of the Bubble iMacs so that they can transfer the critical files to a Mac Mini. This may take some time.

Looks like I'm having a fun start to 2010!

Continuing the threadjack...

I realized that I, too have had some old data that is now inaccessible on newer hardware. I don't know how viable this is for Mac - the last one I was involved with was my wife's, and we ditched Mac after she lost her BS degree term paper with the switch from v7 to v8 due to bad programming on Apple's part - this was back in 93-94. Anyway, emulators have recently helped me to get some of that software back up and running to recover the data - DOSBox, an Apple IIe emulator, a TSR-80 emulator that let me hook the old cassette recorder with my files stored on it to my current PC and the like.

However, even if I couldn't have recovered that info it doesn't dampen my desire to see e-books become the wave of the future. Humanity is a bit of a packrat, and we can't expect to keep everything forever; it is the nature of change that some things get left behind. The important stuff will come forward into the next leap, and if it's important enough to someone, the tools to carry the "other stuff" forward will be there.

 

[jdrakeh]

Maybe somebody has already covered this, but doesn't it make more sense that niche hardware (ebook readers) be built to recognize the most widely used electronic document format (PDF at the present time), rather than expecting the world to dump the most widely used electronic document format in favor of one currently only used on niche hardware (ebook readers)?

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Yeah- that's my take on it.