The Zombie Stack Exchanges That Just Won't Die
I was recently asked to help recover years of sermon and book notes from a pastor friend. They were all done in WP5.1 and saved to floppy disks.
Given that I both do not have a floppy drive and no access to old word processing software (specifically one compatible with WordPerfect 5.1), what is the best way to recover this data?
Given the likelihood of similar requests arising in the future, what is the best way now to start modernizing and maintaining my and others' digital archives so they will always be readily referenceable?
warren
If the floppies are 3.5", then you could purchase a floppy reader that connects to a USB port.
And if the floppies are 5.25", you can still buy an old internal floppy drive on Ebay, and use this adapter to connect it via USB.
As for software, you can easily find ancient software on abandonware and/or torrent sites (or still available for purchase). Even if the precise version of WordPerfect can't be found, I would think that a slightly later version would be able to open and convert the files.
If the software is too old to run in Windows, you may need to run it in an emulator (such as DosBox). Fortunately, there are forums and FAQs for pretty much every type of emulated system out there.
what is the best way now to start modernizing and maintaining my and others' digital archives so they will always be readily referenceable?
As far as I can tell PDF/A is a very well-considered format for archiving. It requires documents to contain no external dependencies like fonts or images.
I am going to agree with the recommendations above for getting the content off the media. If possible use a USB device. I originally tried to use a Ubuntu machine (9.04) but the kernel no longer Auto-supports 5.25 floppy drives. This is totally fixable but requires a bit of config adjusting.
Remember that the FC5025 connected drive will need to be powered off of your motherboard so be prepared to do a little tinkering. I recommend finding some non-collection disks to experiment with before you try to use media you might care about.
If the first drive fails, don't be discouraged. we went through several drives trying to find one that worked.
Emulators are good, but you might be able to get what you are looking for by opening the files in a text editor as well, this has proved useful to me.
As for the future Digital Archiving, LOCKSS, a good migration policy, and PDF/A seems to be the best practice.
If your a bit more concerned use MD5 checksums to ensure your data remain uncorrupted.
As for wordperfect, looks to be a community here that might be helpful.
The first thing I would do with old WP5.1 files is to open them in WP5.1. I have recently found a copy of WP5.1 for MS-DOS on an abandonware website, and it worked well within DosBox on Linux.
Probably the best way to preserve the original layout and formatting of these documents is to print them from WP5.1 into a PostScript file that can then be converted into PDF/A using separate, modern software. In order to archive the contents, you could also save copies in Rich Text Format (RTF) and plain text (which you should then convert to UTF-8 Unicode unless it is pure US-ASCII).
Quick View Plus is a handy tool that lets you view a large number of different file formats and is pretty affordable. Here's an archivist's take on using it.