I thought this evening would be a good evening to try and do some archiving of some of my documents and images from various systems from over the years. In particular, it has been my desire and hope to go through all of my various old media caches (3.5″ disks, Zip disks, old CDs and DVDs) and get the images off of them and onto one drive for storage.

I also thought in the process I would end up getting clutter off my entry way table.

What I think and what tends to happen are usually different.

I have a newer Mac laptop and an older Mac laptop that I currently use, and I wanted to get everything onto the newer one to be able to organize and consolidate everything.

The first thing I thought I would do was check Zip disks to salvage from each of them what I could ad wanted for posterity. I had borrowed a Zip drive from work to see what was on these disks, but the drive seemed to be acting a little wonky connected to the newer computer. It took a long while to read the disks. A few of them had stuff on them, but several were unreadable to the drive, and locked. The result of spending 15 years in storage, I guess.

I did finally get the 10 zip disks reviewed and files copied off that I wanted, so then I wanted to check CDs. I inserted a handful of CDs into the newer machines drive, and it treated all of the disks as empty, which I knew was not true with the last two disks. So I pulled out the older laptop to verify one of the CDs I knew had data on it. The disk inserts the drive and mounts correctly, and the files are there. I am happy. I hit the eject button on the keyboard. The laptop whirrs and grinds like it is going to huck out the CD- but after its noisemaking, no disk appears. I try again. And then I try alternative eject commands and key combos to try to get the disk out. Nada.

The disk is stuck in the drive. The laptop I usually use to write on now has a disc stuck in its SuperDrive.

I have a brainstorm, recalling I did have an external CD drive in storage I could at least use to load and view other CDs- except this drive can only connect to a machine with a firewire interface, which was hot on machines for a few years before giving way to a faster USB port. The new machine does not have a Firewire port on it. I can only use the external drive on the old machine, which has a disk stuck in its native drive.

So then it’s Googling for possible manual solutions to removing the CD from the older machine’s drive. A few clunky suggestions appear in the search. And then there is the “take the machine part” option. And it is pushing 10PM.

I have a bunch of CDs in cases on the floor by the table. The table top has two laptops on it, both dead in the water regarding data pulls from CDs.

I have an old DVD allegedly with a bunch of old stuff on it- but to my non-surprise, the SuperDrive on the newer machine won’t read it, the SuperDrive on the old machine is out of action with a stuck CD, and the external CD drive is just that- a CD only drive for reading.

And there are now zip disks on the table, and a screwdriver set, and a few CDs I tried to read and copy items from, and extra cords.

And little archiving completed.

So it goes. I guess I’ll try again soon. Maybe in another two months.

And I wonder why my house is filled with so much clutter.