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OT - Old Format Electronic Document Retrieval
https://www.rypn.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=46497		 Page 1 of 3
Author:  PCook [ Sun Apr 24, 2022 6:41 pm ]
Post subject:  OT - Old Format Electronic Document Retrieval
I recently was given a large lot of "old" format Word for DOS and Office 95 documents from a retiree, saved on floppy discs. I just wanted to share the experience that a Windows 98SE "gaming" computer with USB ports and Office 2007 makes quick work of the updating to more modern formats. This provides a one-stop work station to go from the document formats Microsoft will not let you open on modern machines, directly up to post-2007 docx format. It also lets you update old PowerPoint programs to pptx the same way, and save them to a flash drive to walk to a more modern computer.

Amazing the old floppy discs read perfectly after 30 years.

If you are updating old Word documents remember to also save to a non-Microsoft format (like RTF) while you are doing the work.

This is just to let you know what worked well for me in this situation. If you have a better way to do it, please explain it to us.

PC
Author:  jayrod [ Sun Apr 24, 2022 7:30 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: OT - Old Format Electronic Document Retrieval
Good to know. A few more tips:

Anything that I know will require long term digital storage, I’ll also convert it to a pdf file with the fonts embedded. Pdf is about the most universal file format there is. I use Adobe Acrobat Pro for conversions.

If not pdf format, stick to the universal web-safe fonts especially if you’re using MS Word or another word processing program that works in html. That way if you open the document on another computer, it’s very likely those fonts will be installed and the formatting and text won’t get wonky or replaced with something not intended. You can look up the list of web safe fonts online.
Author:  Al Stangenberger [ Sun Apr 24, 2022 8:23 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: OT - Old Format Electronic Document Retrieval
Libre Office can also do some ancient file formats. It opened an old Mac Works file and converted it to a modern spreadsheet format with no problem.

Libre Office can also export documents as PDF's.
Author:  jayrod [ Sun Apr 24, 2022 8:52 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: OT - Old Format Electronic Document Retrieval
Forgot to mention…. I don’t think this topic is OT. We all have documents in digital format that must be saved and knowing how to work with them is a worthwhile thing to discuss.
Author:  Alexander D. Mitchell IV [ Sun Apr 24, 2022 10:19 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: OT - Old Format Electronic Document Retrieval
From-the-trenches experience:

Assume you will run into defective media, and research and download "drive rescue" programs, meant to repair files rendered inaccessible because of a faulty sector of the drive in question. There are "freeware" programs, low-cost ones, and ones aimed at people who will be fired if they don't get it yesterday ($$$$$).

I got into this digital archiving 20 years ago being asked to salvage a library's inventory stored on a then-flaking floppy; I salvaged 98.5% of it but it took ages...... then ages again to update the old Wordperfect files into Excel, with three of us correcting multitudes of errors. Then I beat it into their heads to back up compulsively.

Don't get complacent. I've already rescued files from corrupted laptop drives, CD-Rs, CompactFlash cards, MemorySticks, SD cards, and USB "thumb drives" too.
Author:  Pegasuspinto [ Sun Apr 24, 2022 10:45 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: OT - Old Format Electronic Document Retrieval
I've mad a minor hobby of retaining old format drives, at least a few. MAN there were a ton, right in the late 90's when CD-ROM's were starting to get too small. IOMEGA Zip and Jaz drives were popular but are all but dead. SyQuest made high-capacity drives and they were reasonably popular. Old hard drives were IDE and SCSI and a couple other old formats, that are fading into oblivion. Gonna find precious information on all these drive types. Used to be multiple tape drives for information backup, too.
Author:  PCook [ Sun Apr 24, 2022 11:04 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: OT - Old Format Electronic Document Retrieval
Interesting the IOMEGA drives are mentioned. I have an internal IOMEGA ZIP on the Windows 98SE computer, and on a few (infrequent) occasions it has been very useful. It is also pretty amazing how well the ZIP media have done with age.

PC
Author:  jayrod [ Mon Apr 25, 2022 8:06 am ]
Post subject:  Re: OT - Old Format Electronic Document Retrieval
Always back up your computers religiously. That’s part of basic data management. I can’t stress that enough. For your average consumer, I can almost understand being ignorant of such things but an organization should really know better. If you don’t, you’ll eventually find out.

Believe it or not, I have a 3.5” floppy drive installed in my work station specifically for the times that someone hands me a floppy and says the image you need is on here. It’ll be about a 50/50 shot that the disk is still fully readable.

A handy little $30 gizmo to have, especially when working with older computers, is an IDE/SATA hard drive converter that you can plug into another computer via USB. For one example of usage, my main laptop suffered a motherboard failure during a full backup which rendered the backup unusable. I was able to remove the laptop hard drive, plug it into said converter, and easily access all my data files and transfer them to another laptop. Of course I had to install all the software I use onto the second laptop, which is a pain, but at least I didn’t lose any data.
Author:  PCook [ Mon Apr 25, 2022 9:53 am ]
Post subject:  Re: OT - Old Format Electronic Document Retrieval
Eric, you just reminded me to order a IDE/SATA 2.5/3.5/USB drive adapter. They are indeed a potentially very useful device.

They have also got floppy drives with a USB plug that you can use with a computer that does not have a permanent drive installed.

PC
Author:  Overmod [ Tue Apr 26, 2022 9:31 am ]
Post subject:  Re: OT - Old Format Electronic Document Retrieval
I still maintain my original Mac IIx (originally delivered with A/UX but drive replaced to be able to run Word 4.0) and LaserWriter NTX to be able to access and print my 'library' of older files, including a number formatted in Quark Express (I don't even remember the original version). I keep a couple of Windows machines of various ages back to Windows 3.0 to be sure I have working capability. I fire them up carefully and run a disk-compression program (which rewrites and therefore remagnetizes/'refreshes' the drive's data representation, and identifies any incipient points of failure or corruption). I am depressed at the number of generations of 'secure' backup media that have proven both obsolescent and fragile even at this comparatively early date in "computer archive history".

If you are keeping word-processing documents that will ever be interchanged with others, ALWAYS save them in Rich Text format (.rtf on Windows systems) if you can. It was my experience that WordPerfect, by intent and possibly as the result of legislation, could not open Microsoft Word files, and vice versa. At one point my wife's business partner thought he had to 'print to PDF' to have something many of his correspondents could open and read easily.

I don't see a likelihood that either Rich Text or Adobe PDF will become functionally obsolete soon, and in any case they can be opened and read using one of a number of online VMs, some of which are free to access on the Web.
Author:  PCook [ Mon May 09, 2022 5:02 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: OT - Old Format Electronic Document Retrieval
I am going to add another "OT" entry in this discussion. I was recently setting up a laptop computer with a late release version of Windows 10, and found that windows speech recognition will work with LibreOffice, an independent office suite. I am not sure how far "back" into Windows 10 versions this will work, but to find out whether it works on your machine, just open a new document in LibreOffice Writer, put the cursor where you want to dictate text, and hit the Windows (Flag) Key and "H". If it is supported in your version, a microphone control box will appear at the top of the document window. If Windows speech recognition is not turned ON, it will tell you to turn it ON. Click that message to take you to the setting and turn it ON. Then go back to LibreOffice Writer, turn on the microphone and position the cursor, and start talking to see if it listens and writes.

If no microphone control box appears you can assume your version of W10 does not support this feature.

It does basic document control commands like "period" and "new paragraph".

Having a fast processor and good memory in the computer seems to help it to work properly. On an old machine upgraded from XP or Win7 with limited memory and outdated processor, you might not get good results even if the Windows 10 version has the proper features. The computer needs to be able to keep up with your talking.

This is for information only, take it or leave it as you see fit. If you have better information please share it.

PC
Author:  Ed Kapuscinski [ Mon May 09, 2022 9:32 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: OT - Old Format Electronic Document Retrieval
PCook wrote:
Interesting the IOMEGA drives are mentioned. I have an internal IOMEGA ZIP on the Windows 98SE computer, and on a few (infrequent) occasions it has been very useful. It is also pretty amazing how well the ZIP media have done with age.

PC


Oh my goodness. Get EVERYTHING you can off those Zip drives and burn them before you hear the Click of Death. The whole lot of them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_of_death

I used to love Zip drives, then I was burned once on something incredibly important.

Don't trust em.
Author:  PCook [ Mon May 09, 2022 11:39 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: OT - Old Format Electronic Document Retrieval
I recently got a box of Zip discs from a retired engineer, several would not function, but maybe 95% of the information was saved to newer formats on current media. When Zips get here, they are on a one-way trip to the dump. Information from people who designed or built railroad equipment is always worth making an effort to save, the type of media it is stored on is not very important to me.

PC
Author:  Overmod [ Tue May 10, 2022 11:31 am ]
Post subject:  Re: OT - Old Format Electronic Document Retrieval
I have a question that I can't research myself.

If you invoke speech recognition in Windows 10 by activating it in LibreOffice, will it then work with a legacy program like Dragon that has been, ahem, thoroughly adapted to technical terms and material? In the future there is very good support for older programs running in virtual machines, but audio I/O has been a traditional trouble point on VMs in general, particularly if abstracted in someone's "cloud".
Author:  PCook [ Tue May 10, 2022 2:36 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: OT - Old Format Electronic Document Retrieval
I get the impression that Dragon functions quite independent of windows speech recognition features, using the computer's microphone but not necessarily any WSR functions.

The windows speech recognition is flaky with some applications, like Thunderbird e-mail. It may work for a while but if you stop talking it stops converting and won't start again. How well it works depends a lot on the computer processor and memory.

Dragon is by far the best choice for overall stability and the ability to learn as you go.

There is a neat little free download speech to text converter app in the Windows Store that translates your speech to text within a text box, then you sweep and copy it to paste into other applications. That works very well with e-mail programs. Of course you can dictate text in Dragon, if you have it, and copy and paste into e-mail programs too.

PC
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