Thanks Pete 🤗😌

A4e - Well, for starters, all my music had to be recorded, instrument by instrument via various multi-track recording devices, varying from early 4 track cassette type, Sansui 6 track(again cassette), to my most up to date Boss (digital). The really early stuff was recorded on stereo tape to tape machines. In other words I have the masters of all my (recorded) songs safe and sound. Post-mix down I save master copies (first-offs) to CD-RW. That only covers one part of any particular song though. That's when the PC comes in. You have to remember, I'm not only working on my music. Over the years I've collaborated with other songwriters/musicians, not all from UK. It's important to keep their stuff secure as well. Back to my stuff; not only do I keep various mixes of songs, there's lyrics and readable song sheets for each (some songs I've been working on for years, believe it or not). Incidentally, I don't use cloud; don't understand it, therefore don't trust it. I started using Raspberry Pi a while back, so as to be mobile and able to not be tied down to my studio. It worked ok for written music and is what I would recommend to you to try for picture storage, although pics are very hungry things when stored digitally, so Rasp Pi (very small, size of a credit card) may not have enough capacity. My other and best suggestion for you is DVD-RW discs. They're inexpensive and hold quite a bit. Not sure if any of this helps, but you did ask nicely.

Ethan Sutcliffe has joined Tonbridge Angels on loan until January. His third loan spell with Tonbridge over the past 2 seasons

He had many rivers to cross but now the only one he will traverse is the Styx

Someone worthy of a RIP - Jimmy Cliff (81)

Thanks Woking 👍

I usually get my Hakan madras hot.

A4E you might be surprised to find your slides are higher resolution than you might think. Most recommendations are to scan at 4000 dpi if planning to create large prints/want the most detail or 2000dpi for smaller prints and viewing on screen

CW - good shout - mine's a pint of Hakan Mild !!

OTD possibly Hakan Mild?

Thanks OI - most of the slides are in pretty good nick, although obviously the quality of the images isn’t exactly 4k UHD standard… 😬

As an aside there are numerous devices available for reading 3.5 inch floppy disks though with the much older 5.25 inch ones it is getting harder to find readers.

How clean are your old slides a4e? I started digitising but quickly discovered there was too much muck on them (though they were kept in slide boxes or carousels) and it took a long time to clean each one up, maybe AI will solve that problem. I'm sure it will be possible to connect USB devices for a long time to come, even if it is via adapters to some new standard. How long will an external drive work is another question and as I said to Pete, check from time to time that your back-up is in a good state, nothing much worse than needing to restore and finding the back-up is corrupted.

Pete - question from someone who doesn’t really properly understand how computers work or how data is stored…. Can you foresee a time where it isn’t possible to store (for example) all your music on an actual device other than in a “cloud”, or do you think there will always be a way to keep them on, say, an external hard drive…? I’ve got the majority of my older photos on a separate hard drive, but I sometimes think that at some point it might be impossible to connect it to anything where I can view them. I also have thousands of slide transparencies from 45 years ago when I travelled across the US, Australia, and South East Asia - is it even worth digitising them, and if so, what’s the best way of storing the images for future viewing?

Good knowledge Russ.

Dan Agyei would have been for Burnley. Came on in the 88th minute of a game against Liverpool.

The Japanese team (NICT and Sumitomo Electric) achieved an internet speed of 1.02 Pbit/s, fast enough to download all of Wikipedia in one second.

Yep, all backed up.

Sure about that one Bert?

Well I hope you are thorough about back ups with all that music pete.

OI - All my own music is on this pc. I understand how to do stuff, so am loathed to change (again). Too old to be bothered with learning another load of new stuff. I still convert prices to £sd in my head. Can't press a button and quickly delete all that old shite we were taught. It's there for keeps, clogging up the works, along with all the new stuff we have to come to terms with. If I can get away with keeping W10, I will. Thanks for your input.

But you can pay for extended support

Dan Agyei for Stoke also!

I use Windows Classic to make my desktop look like Windows 7 ... my favourite

Bert - cheers 👍