Future of Old Britts Technical Articles (2018)

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Thanx Ella and Fred. I appreciate all your help over the last 15 years, couldn't have done it without you!
 
Ditto on the thank you Ella and Fred. Pouring over your technical articles and speaking with you a few times in the last two years has been invaluable... as was an enlightening discussion about WW2, including the Eye of the Needle! We Norton owners owe you, big time!
 
And the parts catalogue too. It's just as useful as the tech articles (Thanks Fred and Ella!)
 
I'll chime in here and send my public Thanks to Fred and Ella, too. Fantastic service, full range of spares, free and easily accessible advice with the Tech articles, a terrific resource for the Norton community.
 
MexicoMike said:
FWIW, I have seen sites suddenly leave for whatever reason and years of info disappeared with it. No explanation, no warning, nothing. Yesterday the site's there/normal; today it's gone as if it never existed - click on your link and you just get a "site does not exist" or similarly worded message from the search engine.

I would not assume that the info will somehow remain on the web. It will only remain if the site owner maintains the site. If he/she doesn't, it's gone. In the past year I have personally seen this with a motorcycle site, a car site, and a vintage electronics site. In one case it was extremely annoying because I was restoring some tube (valve) equipment based on the site hosted by one of the original designers of the gear. Then it was gone...
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https://archive.org/web/

I’ve found sites I made in the early 90s.
 
swooshdave said:
https://archive.org/web/

I’ve found sites I made in the early 90s.
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I have used that and other archive sites successfully but I was not able to find three sites that disappeared within the last year. I have no idea how the archives actually work so I don't know why one site would be archived and another not. But in the case of the three sites I referred to earlier, no one has, so far, been able to reconstruct the data/messages/tech articles that were on those sites.

Side rant:
Seems ironic (or is it MOronic) that books/documents from 1000+ years ago are still around and readable when something written last week can be gone because of a glitch/software/hardware update. ;) I lost 200 pages of a doc I was writing/had stored on the cloud when the server died. The response - "Oops, sorry, here's a free storage upgrade for future documents." :(
 
The "cloud" is an absolutely last resort, non-critical storage medium for me.

I back up regularly from my thumb drive to my local hard drive, then monthly to DVD, and quarterly I copy the DVDs to an external archive drive.

ZERO "cloud" for me. Even my photos get backed up physically, although readily uploadable copies reside on my PictureTrail account.
 
When I took records management in school 250 years ago we were told backup is three copies and one of them is remote to
your server location. Your server, of course, is RAID array.
It never failed me and I retired undefeated.
 
Onder said:
When I took records management in school 250 years ago we were told backup is three copies and one of them is remote to
your server location. Your server, of course, is RAID array.
It never failed me and I retired undefeated.
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Exactly. I have my laptop backed up to a RAID array, and that is backed up to thumb drives I keep out of my house.
 
Another related issue - what was once commonly readable may not be as time marches on. I have a bunch of docs that I wrote back in the early 80's and no current computer can even load the discs. ;)

I should'a kept that TRS-80! :)
 
MexicoMike said:
Another related issue - what was once commonly readable may not be as time marches on. I have a bunch of docs that I wrote back in the early 80's and no current computer can even load the discs.
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Yep, I spent literally hundreds of hours drawing zoo animals from memory in MS paint on my 286 with early VGA color (640x480), stored onto a 5-1/4" 1.2MB floppy; each drawing was the large subject animal, some background habitat, and a tiny detailed insect or other creature hiding somewhere in the piece.

A couple of years ago, I tried to read the floppy on an old PC I managed to slap together, and the disc had become unreadable. How sad, those memories were attached to our son as a little kid, he's now 33 and can't show them to our grandkids. They were some of my best drawings ever, as I don't typically do natural stuff, just bikes, cars, and other mechanical drawings, for the most part. They were also my first "correct" drawings, as I zoomed in and detailed them pretty extensively.

I did have other drawings of Triumphs, this was before my Norton-inclusive days; those are also lost...

BUNNY-TRAILING, sorry.
 
grandpaul said:
Yep, I spent literally hundreds of hours drawing zoo animals from memory in MS paint on my 286 with early VGA color (640x480), stored onto a 5-1/4" 1.2MB floppy; each drawing was the large subject animal, some background habitat, and a tiny detailed insect or other creature hiding somewhere in the piece.

A couple of years ago, I tried to read the floppy on an old PC I managed to slap together, and the disc had become unreadable. How sad, those memories were attached to our son as a little kid, he's now 33 and can't show them to our grandkids. They were some of my best drawings ever, as I don't typically do natural stuff, just bikes, cars, and other mechanical drawings, for the most part. They were also my first "correct" drawings, as I zoomed in and detailed them pretty extensively.

I did have other drawings of Triumphs, this was before my Norton-inclusive days; those are also lost...

BUNNY-TRAILING, sorry.
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We used to use those 5 "1/4 drives in ATM's, If your discs have been stored flat dry and away from magnets they should work, I would search around for another drive, TEAC were pretty good back in the day. If you are struggling companies like this may be the answer. http://www.datarecoverymasters.com/apages/20170208-2/5-14-floppy-disk-data-recovery-service/
 
I have over 10k pictures on hard drives. Magnetic. DVD is way too small for backing this up. At some point magnetic will be a dodo and if Im
still alive Ill have to migrate in time to whatever is the new standard. Of course, highly likely nobody will care about my pix and poof! they
will be as gone as I will be.
Technology marches on!
 
Fred and Ella have retired. Their website is now composed only of their technical articles. Not all of the links are active, but you can download the articles for what looks like a limited time. I've just finished putting them on my hard drive.
 
@Tin Man it said in a recent Andover Norton newsletter that they have agreed with Fred and Ella that they will host the Old Britts technical articles from the Andover website.

...I read this about 30 mins after I spent ages downloading all the articles to my home PC.

Either way, it's great news that they will live on!
 
As I have Acrobat Pro XI, I can convert entire web pages to PDFs and edit if/as needed. When I first heard they planned to retire, I made PDF copies of most of the tech articles, including photos, editing out the adverts & links in the right hand column [to reduce file size]. Fred it listed as author to all those articles. So, if for any reason their web site disappears, those articles will not be lost.
I just checked their tech articles. It appears that the right hand column has been removed from the articles.
 
Just sad that OB is gone. I guess it's just one of those "end of an era" parts of normal life but it's a sobering reminder that change is normal and that things we do today will, before we know it, becomes things we no longer can (or wish to) do. :(

Heck, it won't be too long before internal combustion engines are (mostly) gone and nobody will miss them other than old folks reminiscing about the "good old days"...if they can remember anything. ;)
 
MexicoMike said:
Just sad that OB is gone. I guess it's just one of those "end of an era" parts of normal life but it's a sobering reminder that change is normal and that things we do today will, before we know it, becomes things we no longer can (or wish to) do. :(

Heck, it won't be too long before internal combustion engines are (mostly) gone and nobody will miss them other than old folks reminiscing about the "good old days"...if they can remember anything. ;)
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Ride it like you stole it, till you can't.
 
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