Who owns your data?

Who owns your data?

Posted May 10, 2012 5:42 UTC (Thu) by eru (subscriber, #2753)
Parent article: Who owns your data?

Trying to read a Microsoft Word document from 20 years ago is likely to be an exercise in frustration,

At work I have sometimes had reasons to do precisely that, and found OpenOffice manages it better than modern MS Office. Only the layout may be a bit off. Actually the old Word format is simple enough that even strings(1) can be used to recover the plain text parts.

if one can even track down a 3.5" floppy drive (not to mention 5.25").

That's one reason I'm keeping a couple of those in my basement (along with a couple of old computers). Actually 5.25" formatted as 360k (DSDD) is surprisingly durable. I once did a transfer job for an author who wanted to access some old manuscripts (?, can you call them that?) written on a MS-DOS machine with Wordstar and kept in boxes of 5.25" disks for 10 years, and found just two or three files that failed to be read.

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