The Sport of Transfer

Today, I scanned in a ten year old booklet for safekeeping, since it's getting a bit tatty already from the amount of times that I've referenced it and is no longer in print. There were a total of 24 files, which came to roughly 400 MB, and I needed to transfer them from one computer to another. No problem, then, in this day and age, surely? Just use the CD burner.

The problem is that the CD-RW drive on this particular machine is a little temperamental, or perhaps just mental, so it made coasters of the first two discs and then when it actually deigned to write a disc properly for me (all at a paltry 4x speed), it turned out that two of the files were corrupt.

Rather than transfer these last two files, which were 30 MB combined, via yet another disc plus two coasters, I decided to use the interweb. My first thought was Gmail, but the connection to it was borken. So then I tried Yahoo! but that didn't allow attachments of more than 10 MB. So then I decided to scp them but I didn't have scp on that machine and when I went to download the package I found that cygwin.com was down too. So I ended up using FTP, after all that.

Incidentally, since this is an educational booklet and since it's no longer in print and so on, I'm trying to secure permissions to reproduce either part or all of the text online; it's connected to the luminous phenomena collectanea that I'm working on.

Cody was asking today why nobody likes floppy discs anymore, which got us talking about their reliability rates, whereupon John Cowan noted that he once had a script that copied files to discs in triplicate with different file names, in the hope that the redundancy would work. I used to do that manually across discs, but even then there wasn't a 100% success rate. And eventually floppy discs would just fall apart; though I have some that were still working last time I checked them, a year or two ago, having been in full working order for several years.

I suppose I could've used Amazon S3, but I'd want to keep the data and then I'd be paying for it each month... (and it turns out that the site is down right now anyway, though perhaps the actual upload servers are still working).