holy ancient emails, batman!
My digital lost box in the attic
Imagine for a moment that you stumble upon a musty old box. Maybe you found the box in an attic. Or a basement. Or a friend’s house. Or wherever. Doesn’t matter.
You open up the box and inside are love letters from past loves, letters from friends, including pictures, from people you know and/or knew, and a whole treasure trove of stuff you totally forgot about years ago – all about your life and what you were doing at the time.
Wouldn’t you be happy to find that?
When I restored all that old email, and it worked, I was ecstatic. Happy, happy and more happy. I couldn’t believe all the stuff I got back. Letters, photos and tons of memories. Some good, some not-so good – but that’s okay. They’re all there. In original form. There’s no way to put a price on how valuable this stuff is to me.
Bear in mind the the CDs that I restored the data from have traveled quite a bit, and could have easily been lost and/or destroyed in transit.
But they survived.
And now those seemingly insignificant little bits of data serve as an archive of what my life was back then.
It is nothing short of amazing that all this stuff was sitting on three scratched up and pitted old CDs that haven’t been touched for nearly a decade.
Can you say, “Wow”?
And yes, it’s backed up now. Properly. :-)
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[...] I had email archives on CD dating all the way back to 2001 which used these two formats. I wrote about this on my personal site, so I can speak first hand on how the conversions [...]
Wow is right. The oldest e-mail I still have from you is probably from 2004… kind of makes me sad. We did write some really great letters back then. :)
Any possible chance you can forward them to me, so I can meander down nostalgia lane with you?
Unfortunately all I have from that era is the greeting cards and only one of the conversations. This was probably at the time I was using ICQmail and it got wiped. (bleah) But I’ll send what I have.