Migrating Old Data

Or, why we tech-geeks keep a bunch of old crap around even though our wives plead with us to dump it.

Ah, old hardware. <sarcasm>Fun Stuff</sarcasm>. You know that thing you threw away two months ago, the one you suddenly found you needed? I have a room full of stuff that would be like that — only I don't throw it away. 300 BAUD modem: got that; Newton battery charger: check; old SCSI enclosures: you bet; Mac OS 9 computers: yep. I even have an original floppy for Mac OS 1.0 — no joke, 1.0 was shipped for about 15 minutes before Finder 1.1 came out.

As an aside, if you want to be brought to tears, find an old Mac 128k (the original) and boot it up off of floppy: 10 seconds, I kid you not. Steve Jobs was said to scream at an engineer that he HAD to shave off 5 seconds from the boot time because lives were at stake. Because, with millions of reboots by millions of people per day, 5 seconds literally adds up to entire lifetimes. Oh, if only Apple cared that much about lifetimes now-a-days. Ok, I guess you could argue this to make a case that every Mac should have a solid state drive. But I digress. Back to (Ok, on to) migrating old data.

A client I hadn't heard from in OVER a decade called me the other day. He has a Mac G3, Beige, running Mac OS 8.1. He has upgraded to a new iMac with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and needs to migrate his data. Thinking I would be dealing with an old SCSI drive, I got out one of my PowerMac G4s, with SCSI, IDE and USB. I was actually getting excited about firing up an old SCSI drive and jury-rigging a way to migrate the data to 10.6.

Turns out that the Beige G3 had and IDE drive in it — a 4Gb one. So, I didn't need anything but an external case. Only, for whatever reason, the drive did NOT want to function in either one of two cases. So, we popped the drive into the G4 anyway, into one of the open IDE spots. Because the old G4 had only USB 1.1, we realized that it would take forever to migrate all of the data to an new drive via USB. Instead of using USB, we pushed the data over the network over to the new drive connected to another computer which had USB 2. Done in 14 minutes.

As my client put it, that's a year a minute (14 years worth of his data).