Lesson learned: Keep a vintage Mac around

Recently, I learned the importance of keeping old files current, and why it's helpful to keep a working vintage Mac around. The school I work for was audited by both the state and Federal Departments of Education earlier this summer (we passed with flying colors, by the way). They wanted to see everything we could hope to show them, and many of the faculty and directors were pulling out research they had conducted years ago to satisfy their demands. However, none of the files could be opened. This is how they landed on my desk.

I had folders upon folders of Microsoft Excel files...from 1989! Yes, these were genuine Excel 1.0 documents, created the year I graduated high school. Excel 2004 wouldn't open them, nor would Excel X, Excel '98, NeoOffice/J or OpenOffice. What's left to do? Call on a vintage Mac. More after the jump.

My first thought was to run them through MacLink Plus, but it doesn't support Excel 1.0 either (because, really, who has such ancient artifacts around anyway?). So I grabbed a beige G3 from the supply room, got it running and installed a copy of Excel 4.0. That opened the dusty, old files, and Excel 2004 had no problem with the files saved in 4.0 format.

Here's the lesson learned from this experience. While my story relates to a corporate setting, you could easily employ this strategy to your own home use.

Keep you stuff up to date. Sounds simple, but it's easy to forget about files you almost never access. I've given the staff here a deadline for getting all their older files to me (many of which are on rapidly-decaying floppies). These will be converted, burned to CD, cataloged and stored. At home, you may have old photos, MacWrite files (it can happen!), WordPerfect files, etc. that you think you'll never use again. Trust me, you will.
Archive as part of a formal routine. The CDs I've created will be updated on a regular schedule. Using Toast's "burn session" option, I can burn to a single CD-RW many times without overwriting what's already there. Go through your older files and convert them to a contemporary file format (provided that you can't use them as-is...but I'd still update) and either put them on CD, DVD or a removable hard disk. I like to have a hard copy, so I typically use CDs/DVDs for archives. Set up a repeating calendar event to remind you.
Finally, keep a vintage Mac around! I was quite surprised to see the number of ancient Excel files that still existed here at work, not to mention old WordPerfect files, Clarisworks, Pagemill, etc. When contemporary conversion software fails you (like MacLink), you'll be glad you can open that old file in its native environment.

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Source: http://www.dataviz.com/products/maclinkplus/

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Hardware Cult of Mac

Recently, I learned the importance of keeping old files current, and why it's helpful to keep a working vintage Mac around. The school I...

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tachijuan

There's a simpler way guys. Make sure that you keep your files in a media that is readable for a long time ( CD/DVD is good - floppy is getting to be bad). Then get yourself one of the software emulators out there. There are many for MAC's - sheepsaver, basilisk, etc. Keep those around. You will then be able to use your most current hardware to emulate the oldest hardware to run the old software. Far, far easier to do this and make sure that it's a lont term solution. Hardware eventually will fail - sofware is bits and if you are careful you can always make more copies of it.

August 19 2005 at 9:37 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Bmwe46

I had the problem but with photoshop, i have a computer with photoshop 3 with some pics i want, not a mac mind you, ive used the newer comp with adobe 6 i think it is, but the picture wont open instead it will say i need photoshop 3... how on earth would they update a software to make it not open older files? i can open it on the old comp, but its so old and on windows 95 that it wont even recognize my printers!!

August 19 2005 at 12:33 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Geneffects

Don't forget about vMac. One can use that for all of their System 6 and 7 needs.

August 17 2005 at 9:22 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Mauro Mello Jr.

And the best part is, isn't it great that we can still go back into a supply room somewhere, grab a very old Mac (if not really ancient Macs), start it up and go about using it without any problems? Try doing it with *that* other platform...

August 17 2005 at 8:26 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Brett Berish

A FAR better backup strategy is to take your files, zip them and save the zip as 'Redhead lesbians.avi' and put it on Limewire. Give it time, your files will be backed up in 400 places!

August 17 2005 at 7:14 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Simon

Keep an old Mac around ... Hey, I still have a working apple ][ plus with duo drives ! You never know when someone will pull out a 5.25" floppy ! (no pun intended)

August 17 2005 at 6:31 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Scott

Make sure to keep that old computer in good running order too. You wouldn't want to rely on it only to find it fried and unable to boot. Take a page from teh *NIX guys and do a "disaster" recovery drill every year. That will point out the wholes in your backup and archive strategy, including file formats you should update.

August 17 2005 at 4:27 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Patrick

Print to PDF:)

August 17 2005 at 4:23 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

John Stone

I still have a MacPlus around for the really old stuff Pagemaker v1.00 ! In fact I have three vintage Macs just to cope with Pagemaker and Filemaker old files, just in case.

August 17 2005 at 3:41 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

2nd to last sentence: old WordPress files or old WordPerfect files?

August 17 2005 at 3:35 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply