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I feel your pain. Especially with tricky formats like Clarisworks (or in my case, old Cakewalk and Hash Animation Studio) reviving the data might require emulat

I feel your pain. Especially with tricky formats like Clarisworks (or in my case, old Cakewalk and Hash Animation Studio) reviving the data might require emulating the entire OS and environment they existed in. At least for full disk images, the backups contain copies of the software used to create the files. It's really disappointing when software uses unnecessarily complex file formats. Chat logs are an important example: I was dismayed to discover that my Yahoo Messenger chat logs on Windows are stored XOR-obfuscated! [1] There's a lot of compromises to be made between the convenience of making backups and their long term viability. My hope is that by greedily saving all of the bits, there will be enough context to make sense of the data if I really needed to, even if it is an intensive process. A good alternate strategy would be to scoop up the most likely interesting files when processing the backups and re-encode them in more future-ready formats, as derefr suggested. [1] https://cryptome.org/isp-spy/yahoo-chat-spy.pdf https://cryptome.org/isp-spy/yahoo-chat-spy.pdf

ckcheng 10y ago
I've got quite a few old ClarisWorks files as well. At some point I realized all that data would become unreadable (at least not easily) when that file format becomes unsupported. So I went through every ClarisWorks file (with a script) and saved it out into multiple formats (e.g. RTF, PDF). The hope was at least one of those would open... Batch re-encoding those files at the cusp of losing easy access to them turned out to be a lot of possibly error prone work. So to future-proof important documents, now I do that re-encoding continuously up front, whenever those files are saved. But for long term viability, on top of backups, the files themselves have to be in a format usable by programs that will be around for a long time on platforms that won't disappear. Practically, that means using simple file formats (TXT). Or else using a program (LibreOffice) that creates files in an open format that can be easily re-encoded up front into multiple formats like DOC and PDF. The MultiFormatSave extension for LibreOffice makes it easy to save into multiple formats for that purpose. After all that work though, I just found out LibreOffice can open ClarisWorks files. lol...

ckcheng 10y ago

I've got quite a few old ClarisWorks files as well. At some point I realized all that data would become unreadable (at least not easily) when that file format becomes unsupported. So I went through every ClarisWorks file (with a script) and saved it out into multiple formats (e.g. RTF, PDF). The hope was at least one of those would open... Batch re-encoding those files at the cusp of losing easy access to them turned out to be a lot of possibly error prone work. So to future-proof important documents, now I do that re-encoding continuously up front, whenever those files are saved. But for long term viability, on top of backups, the files themselves have to be in a format usable by programs that will be around for a long time on platforms that won't disappear. Practically, that means using simple file formats (TXT). Or else using a program (LibreOffice) that creates files in an open format that can be easily re-encoded up front into multiple formats like DOC and PDF. The MultiFormatSave extension for LibreOffice makes it easy to save into multiple formats for that purpose. After all that work though, I just found out LibreOffice can open ClarisWorks files. lol...