While migrating stuff to the $newbox today I had to go in search of an install CD from a program that I had put on the $oldbox and ended up digging through a bunch (read: several spindles) of burnt CDs and DVDs today. Ugh, how fast things change.
While installing the new box I don’t think I did that much installing from CD or DVD. Other than the original OS and a couple of relatively new games, most everything I use is either archived on my fileserver or a free download off the net. Browser, shell client, etc etc. So looking back through all the burns I’ve made to keep my archives, or apps or games that were so important that I had to burn them. Then they sit on a spindle or in a CD book rotting away! I think I threw about 50 burnt CDs and DVDs out. Some of the gems in there were things like
- 3 copies of various old versions of Windows Vista
- At least 2 incarnations of Ubuntu, all at least 1 major revision old
- A 4 CD set (I think) of Fedora Core 3
- The DVD of Fedora Core 4
- QuickTax 2002
- Mandrake Move (that died eh?)
- Mepis (I thought it was dead, but it wasn’t, it just hadn’t been heard from for a few years).
I think the lesson learned here is to be concious of what you’re burning, and that it’s a lot more common to put a new copy of an app on the file server and notice that there’s an old one there, and delete it than digging through 5 spindles of burns to see if you have the app somewhere on a disk before you burn it off. That an the fact that you can more likely find things on the net and be assured they are shiny and new than digging our your old archive of Adobe Acrobat 5.0….