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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;-jeffB, post: 8084108, member: 27832&quot;]A few years ago, I came across a journal I&#039;d used back in the early 1990s. I was speculating about what I&#039;d be doing differently twenty years down the road.</p><p><br /></p><p>One comment: &quot;imagine keeping things on the computer <i>for permanence</i>&quot; -- at that time, if you wanted to make sure you&#039;d have something later, you <i>printed it out</i>. Today, as I predicted, I have a much better chance of finding things I stored on a computer than things I stored in a filing cabinet. Filing cabinets don&#039;t have global search, and you can&#039;t back them up overnight.</p><p><br /></p><p>But you <i>absolutely</i> have to copy things periodically onto newer media, and into newer formats. It&#039;s usually possible to skip a couple of generations, but not too many.</p><p><br /></p><p>The thing is, computer technology has come <i>so</i> far <i>so</i> quickly that we can do some pretty surprising things when it comes to data recovery and transfer. There are lots of things I could imagine doing to fish information out of old formats, but they just took too much time back in the day -- processing one file could take minutes, and processing thousands was hopeless. Today? Ten or a hundred files per <i>second</i>.</p><p><br /></p><p>As far as Lotus files, I never used the package myself, but I&#039;ve seen suggestions as simple as &quot;rename your .123 file to .wk4 and open it in Excel, everything will be there&quot;. I&#039;m deeply skeptical of <i>that</i> claim, but what have you tried?[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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