Sorry about the dash in the title, but you can’t have a ‘ in a file name or url.

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Most years I love the period between Christmas and New Years. If I have finished a project and am back home this is the time where I can really focus on those “some day” projects, most having to do with hardware upgrades or resurrections. This year was one of those times.

Why wait until this point in time? Because event he non-English speaking “technical recruiters” have stopped calling. Heck, the phone only rings twice per day with telemarketers now.

Since I have seriously started working on two titles, one of which you periodically get snippets of on here, I needed to get my standard backup methodology in place. This meant getting an LS-120 installed and working, then freshly formatting a batch of disks to use as rotating and off-site backup. Laugh all you want. I have a local cloud as well as numerous USB drives, but, for my books, I prefer to keep the working copies on LS-120.

You can read my geek blog if you want to read the geek journey. What is behind this post is the unexpected journey. You see, from time to time I pick up a few LS-120 media if I happen to stumble across them at a good price. It was a habit I developed early on during my LS-120 use.

Those of a certain age, old enough to remember LS-120, floppy, Zip, Jazz and SyQuest remember we were not kind to our media. Zip, Jazz and SyQuest all had a common problem. They were hard platter media which did not take well to shock or bowing. You with your tablets and thumb drives didn’t live through a time when you stuffed your laptop into a soft carry case along with power cords, media and everything else you needed for that meeting or client site project. With Herculean effort you would get the case to zip closed and you would dutifully ignore the rounded bulges of its sides. Those rounded sides were bending/bowing your media and crushing the buttons on your mouse. We would always blame the media and the mouse for their failure.

Hard platter media of the day always left the heads and motors inside of the drive. The path of the heads required perfectly flat media. Your now bent media would quickly grind off the face of the read/write heads. Once again, we always blamed the drive. It was no fault of ours that it failed.

After having killed a few SyQuest drives along with more Zip and Jazz drives than I care to admit, I returned to my trusty LS-120. Up until yesterday I still had two in factory boxes which had never been installed anywhere. I also got a bit wiser, admitting the wadding and stuffing I was doing to get everything inside of that briefcase was the root cause of the problem. As a result, I casually pick some disks up here and there.

Digital camera makers soon recognized some of this removable media would be good to support. Sony had Mavica cameras which recorded to floppy then later models used LS-120. At some point some cameras used those mini-CD things too. I’ve owned two of the floppy based cameras and still use the one for many of the photos on this and my geek blog.

Most of you are unfamiliar with this tech and time period so I had to give you the back story. You needed a frame of reference for what is about to come.

I’ve been zero fill formatting (only way to really find the bad spots) for the past couple of days. About half a dozen of my original road warrior media have given up the ghost but I still have more than enough for my current two book project. I even have ten which are still in factory shrink wrap. I ordered another ten yesterday because the buyer swore up and down they were still in factory shrink wrap and they wanted about $2/disk.

When I need something to be completely unadulterated I burn it off to CD. A write protect tab of any kind can be bumped or removed. Imagine my surprise when I stuck a disk in half way through the first stack only to have the machine say it was write protected. Shouldn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t happen with me, not unless it got bumped.

Apparently I bought some used disks from someone who owned one of those digital cameras. Thankfully they were all G-rated pics. Hopefully you all noticed that car in the one pic.

I don’t know when they went, but that thing looks cool!

So children, let this be a lesson to you. The next time you are pawning off something you got bored with or no longer have a use for, be sure to clean all of your personal stuff off of it.

Enjoy the slide show at the top. I couldn’t save all of the pics, but castles tend to be cool.