Ask MetaFilter posts tagged with archive

Going back in time

messylissa — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 14:01:03 -0800

Is there a way to pull up previous versions of a Myspace profile, specifially, the part that says "Last Login"? I need to be able to pull up someone's private Myspace display to show back "Last Login" dates to use in court to show that the individual has had access to the internet when she has said that she has not. Does anyone know of any way to do so?

Scanning Academic Journals

drill_here_fore_seismics — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 12:43:55 -0800

I'm looking for advice/links on suggested quality/settings for the scanning of academic journals for archiving. The more detail the better. Looking at scanning a lot of academic journals (containing text, diagrams and images) using a professional service (which has been found).

Obviously only want to do this once, so looking for advice on suggested resolutions, file formats, greyscale or colour etc. Essentially this needs to be archival/library quality, that could be turned into other formats (searchable .pdfs or .txt files) as appropriate (any thoughts on advantages of each of those also welcome).

How should I scan 500 40-year-old slides?

Pastabagel — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 09:41:03 -0800

Recommendation for professional 35mm slide scanning services, either through the mail or in the Washington D.C. metro area. Best recommendation for extremely long term archival storage of slides. About 400-500 slides. I have recently come into possession of some very valuable 35 mm slides that are very old. There are about 400-500. Most of the slides are about 40 years old, however some are as old as 55 years old (I didn't think slides went back that far).

The slides are a combination of "Kodachrome Transparency", including the oldest, and "Agfachrome". The way the slides have been stored for the last 30 years at least has guaranteed that they are almost entirely dust and scratch free.

I want to scan these at a very high resolution, but I'm not comfortable dropping these off at a Ritz or Penn Camera store.

Any recommendations for a mail-away service? Any experience with ScanCafe? Any ideas on how I should tell them to do it?

What about storing these slides? The massive B&H catalog doesn't not include anything for storing slides, so any ideas for storage would also be helpful.

Finally, if anyone knows any particularly useful photoshop plugins or filters for color correcting these slides, I'd appreciate that as well.

podcasts

petsounds — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 17:44:59 -0800

Are there any websites that archive podcast audio (*not just links)? I'm looking to download old episodes of shows like"BBC From Our Correspondent", but all the podcast sites I can find such as Odeo and Pluggd.tv only link to the original files, which have long since dissapeared. Are there any sites that back up the actual audio?

Streamline a conversation

colecovizion — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 14:49:54 -0800

Outlook Cleaning/Archive Gurus: Help me eliminate emails with similar (but not duplicate) content! I'm having a hard time finding a way to automate the search and deletion of emails with similar content. I have a manual process that I'm trying to automate.

The method: Every time an email is responded to, the full text is usually retained from the previous response.

Example (without attachments):

* Person #1 sends email
* Person #2 replies to email (includes the first email's full text)
* Person #1 replies to email (includes the first two emails)

Why not just keep the latest response in the conversation and any emails that have unique attachments? This way, you can reduce the Outlook size without compromising any data! Of course, this gets more complex with multiple recipients and responses.

The setup: Let's assume 1000 emails are in 1 giant archive folder. These emails include my sent email and my received email that are ready for archiving. Hence, my manual process....

* Sort by conversation (more often than not, the email text in the body is duplicated each time there is a response)
* Delete the oldest emails within a conversation UNLESS there is a unique attachment or unique text that isn't already in a newer email

In a world without attachments, this would usually keep the most current email in the conversation (which has all of my replies and their replies).

I know this is a very specific request, however, I think this method is pretty snazzy (to blow my own horn here) because it keeps all the unique information and it eliminates the duplicate information. Hence, smaller backups and better searches.

Any guidance is appreciated! Also if you have any Outlook email tricks please post for all to see!

Powerful, Web-friendly media indexing?

mykescipark — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 15:36:51 -0800

I work on the production team for a long-running public radio program. We have a massive archive of shows in digital format (MP3 and AIFF) which we need to collate into a powerful and highly flexible database - something like iTunes, but much more advanced. Does a program exist to do this? The program should meet the following criteria:

- Simple interface (usable by audio pros and administrative staff alike)
- Resides on a server (audio files can be shared and accessed on-demand by multiple users)
- Web-interfaceable (outside users can log on and access database via the Web)
- Streaming and preview capability (users can listen to files before pulling from server)
- Flexible indexing and search (can be searched or sorted by media type, artist, show name, etc.)
- Permissions capabilities (files are "read-only" to most, but read/write to certain key staff)
- Supports (and, preferably, generates) ID3 and other media tags

At the moment, it is strictly for internal use only, but there is some possiblity that we will convert it into a storefront in the future so folks can buy archived shows directly from the database ... but I'm not worried about that right now.

Is there a really high-powered media indexing program that can do all of these things? Or at least a significant subset of them?

Looking for a (very specific) document storage box

Ritchie — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 21:35:01 -0800

I'm looking for a very specific kind of document storage box. I'm looking for a particular kind of document storage box, an example of which I once possessed.

It was sized to store documents of roughly A4 dimensions, with a depth of about 5cm, and constructed from very stiff cardboard. It had a hinged lid, which could be held closed by a couple of elastic loops pulled over the corners. Its size and shape meant it could be stacked horizontally or stored upright on a bookshelf.

Inside there was a large spring-clip mounted on one side that kept the papers inside from shifting around by pressing them to the floor of the box. The one I used to have was used to store loose correspondence and some slender manuals.

I never knew the origin of the box I used to have - it came, and left, with the job.

I was certain that University Products would have the kind of boxes I was after, but they're not quite right. I've googled around a bit, but the search terms I'm using seem to bring the wrong results. They're probably manufactured for a particular industry, but I can't identify which one.

I know I can get document storage boxes from any stationer - the kind with the removable lid that is designed to be stacked on a shelf - but I'd much prefer one similar to the one I used to have.

Any takers? Bonus points if the supplier is in Australia!

Why is the Archive command missing from Outlook's File menu?

VeniceGlass — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 04:50:38 -0800

Why is the Archive command missing from Outlook's File menu? It used to be there - I've used it! There are no group policies at my company affecting it (I've verified with IT).

How do you deal w. all that old email?

ManInSuit — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 08:20:31 -0800

I'm curious how people deal w. their old email. (esp those using Outlook and IMAP, but others, too...) Hi. I’ve asked a related question here before, and seen others who have asked related stuff, too. But I still haven’t found an answer that quite works for me, so I thought I’d try again.

I assume I’m not particularly unusual in how I handle my email:

- I send and receive tons of mail
- I like to spend as little time as possible filing/sorting it. (Most of my mail just goes into a giant “done” folder when I’m finished with it)
- I like to be able to search it, fast. I do this a lot. My email history is kind of my life and my filing system.
- I keep more or less everything
- I like to be able to access my mail when I’m offline on my laptop (though I guess, really, I do this less and less often, as net access is more ubiquitous)
- I also like to be able to access archives of my email from the web when I’m away from my computer.

What I use now is:
- MS-Outlook 2003 (about to upgrade to 2007): I like it pretty well, and would rather not change, though I would if there were some perfect do-everything other solution.
- Lookout to search my email. (Which I’m guessing I might not need when I switch to Outlook 2007).
- I use fastmail.fm as an IMAP server, and occasionally use their web interface to get at my mail when away from my computer.

Things mostly work pretty well.

The problem is that dealing with old email is a hassle. The biggest problem is that Outlook gets slow and unreliable as my PST file gets enormous. A less-pressing problem is that eventually I may run of space on fastmail (a 4 GB limit).

I figure I shouldn’t have to make Outlook open my Entire Mail History From Forever every time I open it up. Most of the time, I only need immediate access to, say, email from the past year or two. But once in a while, I need to be able to get at the older stuff. When I do, I’d like to be able to do a reasonably quick, powerful search.

There must be some useful way to keep my older mail separate, in a reasonably searchable form, but I haven’t figure it out.

I’m really curious: How do other people deal with this?

Is there an easy way to use multiple outlook psts and have them all be searchable?

Is there an easy way to remove folder/messages from an outlook PST while leaving them on the IMAP server? (I’d just as soon leave those old messages up there. There's tons of space on the server…)

Am I foolish to be using outlook for all this? Mostly, I like it well, but its crappiness in the face of large PST’s is really annoying.

Thanks, Green, for any ideas!

How do I open a ".tar.tgz" file?

exolstice — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 05:31:19 -0800

How do I open a ".tar.tgz" file? That's all one long extension. I have a friend who's hosting package expired on www.canaca.com. So I immediately logged-in to backup his information. The problem is the backup function gives me a huge file with a .tar.tgz extension. Now I would like to take the contents of that file and upload to my own hosting service. I tried uncompressing with WinZip, WinRar, WinAce, ZipGenius, StuffIt, Gzip, GUnzip, and more! None of these programs recognize the file as a valid archive. I uploaded the file to my hosting service, and attempted to extract it from there. Same result. I also redownloaded the backup, thinking the original file may have been corrupted, but I got the exact same file down to the byte.

They seem to have disconnected the ftp access, so I can no longer access the files that way. The backup function is my only option.

So am I stuck with a proprietary file which can only be uncompressed on www.canaca.com or is there another way to crack this nut?

Thanks!

How to Raise a Zombie Auction

yellowcandy — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 03:24:39 -0800

I'm trying to see an old, outdated eBay (or eBay.ca) auction (from approx. 6-8 months ago) and have the item number. Can I resurrect the listing? I've tried the usual places--Google cache, archive.org...but I need other options, since I am having no luck so far.

How do I organize and archive my digital photography?

chrisbucks — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 16:08:34 -0800

What is the best work-flow process for handling digital photos from capture, processing to archive? I've been knocking off a few paying assignments lately and have had some work published in newspapers and and quickly finding myself engulfed in both film and digital clutter. Particularly for some of my modeling contracts I find myself ending up with over a gigabyte of photos per shoot. I need to find a way to deal with this. Also I do some medium format and 35mm photography which I scan into the computer.

Currently I'm working as so:
-Capture in RAW
-Edit in photoshop, retain the original CR2 file and also save a jpeg copy, then create a low-res jpeg for the web.
-Once a week back up my directory of photos to an external drive
-I send clients 2 copies of a CD of their shoot, and I burn myself a copy which I file in a accordion folder.

A lot of the photos are sorted by either subject matter or date of capture, really I have no idea what I'm doing and there seems to be several different systems going on at once.

What formats should I be saving the files in? Taking into account the best preservation of quality and of space.

I'm a bit of a digital junk collector, and I'm sure there are photos going back years which are sitting moldering away in my stacks of CDs and on drives. In terms of clients photos is there much point at all in keeping them after handing over the goods and receiving payment?

cross-platform archive encryption?

sero_venientibus_ossa — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 08:21:36 -0800

Is there any way to encrypt an archive so that everyone (PC and Mac, maybe Linux) can open it without installing additional software? I'm using a mac... I was using rar to create the archives but I guess some people with PCs couldn't figure out what to do with them. I could make an encrypted zip archive with stuffit, but i don't know if windows users can unzip it natively. Also, I guess mac users that don't have stuffit installed would be out of luck.

Basically I just want to share some documents online and restrict them to a certain group. I'd like to do it without using .htaccess as well.

How to prove that a web page that's there now, was really there, once it's not there anymore.

ManInSuit — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 19:48:44 -0800

How to prove that a web page that's there now, was really there, once it's not there anymore. Here's the deal:

I'm havine a semi-public disagreement w. some folks. They have some slightly incriminating information on their web site that makes my side of the story look good, and their side of the story looks not so good.

My concern is that they're going to replace the incriminating information with unincriminating information, and then claim that the incriminating information was never there.

Are there any steps I can take now, while the incriminating information is still up, that I can use to prove later that it was there.

I thought about submitting the site to the wayback machine, but the timeframe is all wrong - if they take the site down, they'll do it soon. If I need to demonstrate it was there, I'll need to do that soon, too. I think the wayback machine works on a schedule of months...

(Details left out because they are too embarrassingly boring to explain - neighbourhood politics. Bah...)

First message in Outlook takes a long time to open

Joleta — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 18:29:31 -0800

Why does it take forever (well, almost a minute) for the first message to open in Outlook (2002)? And what can I do about it? This started about a month ago and I'm getting really tired of it. Whenever I open Outlook (2002) and click on a message to open it, it takes a very long time to open. The same thing happens if I want to compose a new message or if I start in Calendar and try to open an appointment. Opening subsequent e-mail or calendar items is quick; it's only the first item I try to open after starting Outlook that takes forever. I don't use the preview pane. I just added 2 GB of memory but that didn't help this particular problem. My Outlook.pst file is 280 MB. My Inbox is about 50 MB, but I have lots of subfolders. I have Auto Archive set to run every 7 days and archive everything that's more than a week old. And in case it matters, I'm running Windows XP (Media Center Edition) with SP2.

What is the best mailing list server software out there?

zooropa — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 15:14:14 -0800

Recommendations needed for mailing list software I'm looking for advice and recommendations on mailing list software.

I need some kind of discussion thread-slash-mailing list listserv. Some of the members of a professional organization I help run are Blackberry-fiends. That is, they want to be able to carry on discussions by firing off a quick e-mail. Other members are very Web-friendly and less mobile, so they want to be able to have discussions via the Web.

I know that what I'm really trying to do is replicate Yahoo! Groups. At its heart, it's a listserv, but it also mirrors everything on the Web in threaded discussion forums. Individuals have the option of participating in either venue (or both).

Believe it or not, I've looked and it appears Yahoo! doesn't offer a private-label version of their Groups package. So I'm turning to all of you. I've been given a recommendation of Net Atlantic, but have not looked into them quite yet.

Any recommendations for a private-label (i.e. no branded version by Yahoo!, Facebook, Google, etc.) discussion listserv that also mirrors itself on the Web?

How can I archive my phone's text messages for future reference, without paying a lot in money or effort?

k7lim — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 10:57:25 -0800

How can I make an archive of my SMS messages? In this era of network-accessible, searchable, archived, free, multi-gigabyte email storage, I'm a little miffed that my SMS storage is limited to arbitrary limit of 50 message on my phone. Lots of important things come in via SMS, and I hate how they just disappear. I get Twitters from friends, nice notes from my girlfriend, voice mail transcriptions from CallWave, business information via GOOG-411's text service... and so on. I'd like for the solution to cost as little as possible. I don't have an unlimited txt plan (I get a few hundred per month) so simply forwarding every SMS I receive and CCing every SMS I send to an email address isn't a very appealing solution as it really raises my SMS costs and takes effort. I'm just putting this out there, because I don't think I'll be able to implement this... if you wanna make a splash doing this for Android or something... have at it!

I need to backup a website to DVD.

asuh — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 19:06:46 -0800

What's the best software and method for completely backing up a website to DVD? I need to archive a website completely to DVD. My dad's cousin passed away and his website is still online so his widow wants a complete backup of his writings and comments.

I have tested software for both Windows and OS X including SurfOffline and Blue Crab but there are usually invalid links, missing images or no @import css files. Once I find the right software, I want to burn the backed up website to DVD and have a cross platform autorun for the index file (so that you don't have to open up Finder or Explorer to find it).

What solutions are there for offline website backups and cross platform dvd backups?

.chm to .pdf conversion in Mac OS X?

Señor Pantalones — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 14:11:51 -0800

.chm to PDF conversion, Mac OS X. There seems to be no easy way to do it. Does anyone have an effective and trustworthy workflow they can recommend? (more inside) After recently switching to Papers for my eBook/journal librarian, I need to get rid of all these pesky .chm files. So far I've tried...

- Tubby (chm expander) to Acrobat Professional. Works, but you need to manually nest chapters and subchapters, and it throws some ugly markup artifacts into the document.

- Tubby to HTMLDoc (cli binary). Does a nice job converting to PDF, better than Acrobat, but spits it all out as one big unordered file, which needs far more reorganization.

- Chamonix -> Print. Only prints single pages as pdf, not entire document.

- chm2pdf (python). Looks promising but even after compiling for OS X it keeps failing...maybe I am doing something wrong.

Any tips would be appreciated, and if you haven't checked out Papers yet, you'll love it...

A good way to archive and search a large store of email on my computer?

ManInSuit — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 18:32:52 -0800

How to store and search lots of old email. Hi. Maybe the green can help with this.

I'm re-arranging a bunch of old email archives. I'm generally of the "Keep it all" philsophy w. email. And I've got a several years worth of mail now.

What I want to do is keep my current mail (say the past year or so) in my email client (outlook) and online via web (fastmail). But I want to keep all the older stuff separate, in a searchable store. (Because both outlook and Fastmail get unhappy when dealing w. multiple gigs of email, and because I don’t really need emails from 4 years ago popping up every time I do a search)

So…

What I imagine I want is an email client that meets the following criteria:

- Works well w. standard Unix Mbox-type files
- Has indexed search capability
- Works happily with very large store of email (say several gigs)
- Has reasonably powerful capacity for doing advanced searches.
- Bonus points for searching inside attachements
- Bonus points for being free.

I’ve looked at a bunch of possible solutions, none seem right.

Eudora: Doesn’t play well w. standard Mbox files. (Notably – it doesn’t read attachments. I think there are other little problems, too).
The Bat: Recommended for large mailstores. But doesn’t have indexed search
Outlook: Too many problems to list
Thunderbird: No indexed search
Opera M2: Little if any advanced search

I’ve also looked into a couple of programs that aren’t email clients that seemed possibly helpful: ImapSize, and Mailbag Assistant. But they didn’t quite do the job either.

I’m sort of surprised that a program that matches these criteria is so hard to find. Surely I can’t be the only person who wants to be able to store and search a large collection of email?

Anyone have any suggestions?

(Gmail, I guess, might be a possibility, though I’m not sure I can see how that would work. Does anyone use Gmail in this way? Is it possible to upload lots of old email folders to it? )

Alternately – does anyone have other smart ideas/strategies for keeping all your old mail in a way that lets you get at it easily, quickly, without it getting the way of your day-to-day work?

How can I host a digital archive?

imposster — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 07:25:46 -0800

Online digital archive: Is it realistic to consider using the Internet Archive for distributing archived digital media or do we need to build it from the ground up? I'm in discussions with some people to create an online digital archive of oral culture. The materials would consist of video, audio, and images all of which would be cared for in their physical form by an established nationality archive. It is associated with the a university (and the next step is to look at different grant options), but in case we can't get outside support, I wonder if using the Internet Archive is a viable distribution channel. Probably we'd end up creating a wiki-style front end to organize the material with links back to the files (or having files embedded on the pages).

I've placed material with IA and it worked out very well. But I'm not an archivist or a librarian and I'm hoping other people might be able to point out the holes the problems with this. At the moment, the only thing I can think of is that there is no guarantee that IA will offer hosting in perpetuity which could require migrating the files to another host in the future.

What is the easiest way to automatically archive multiple IMAP accounts?

philrj — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 18:09:18 -0800

What is the easiest way to automatically archive IMAP emails (incoming and outgoing) from multiple user accounts? Gmail doesn't handle IMAP and I don't have access to our school's server. We need a central location to archive our research projects emails. Mac, PC, or web method okay.

How to save all cached pages for a particular domain?

Ø — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 22:53:10 -0800

A web site with lots of useful information recently went offline, but the cached pages are still available from Google. Is there a program (for either OS X or Windows) that will automatically save all of the cached pages on Google associated with a particular domain?

Web Notebook - On my own server?

DerekTheGeek — Thu, 31 May 2007 09:00:59 -0800

Does anyone know of similar online solution to Google Notebook that one can host on their own servers? I use Google Notebook every day to archive notes and web clips, but I would like to keep my information secure, private, and under my control. There are a number of tools out there that make use of a proprietary client, but I would like the flexibility to view/add/edit content from any Internet enabled computer. I would settle for a proprietary client if I could at least view my “Notebook” from any Internet enabled computer. My best idea so far is to setup my own Joomla (insert other open source CMS) portal for my own use but it sure would be great to find something that was designed to capture and organize such content.

DVD archiving to a media server - best practices?

lifeless — Tue, 22 May 2007 07:03:16 -0800

I'm planning on ripping my DVD collection to a media server, with varying amounts of losslessness depending on the film. There are a lot of ways to do this, and I'm looking for the "best" way. After the jump I'll describe my current plan, please comment on and clarify the various technical considerations. I own about 250 DVD movie titles, and a lot more non-movie DVDs. In trying to reduce clutter from my life and home, I intend to sell all of the movie DVDs except for a handful that have some special significance to me. However, I don't intend to lose the movies, but instead rip them to a fault-tolerant HD array (maybe Drobo, maybe ReadyNAS, maybe something else). Not completely legal, I know, but I'm going to do it anyway.

For proper archival, losslessness is very important. The obvious tricky thing that results from that is the amount of hard drive space required, especially since fault tolerance is a must. There's no way around the fact that a lot of money needs to be spent on hard drives.

To lower the HD costs somewhat, I'll divide the DVD's into two categories: 1) lossless ripping for important films with several discs, particularly good extras or otherwise high bitrate requirements, and 2) lossy ripping for less important films and films with unimportant extras. The lossless option is simple: I'll just decrypt the DVD and copy the VIDEO_TS folder onto the HD array. I have all the tools I need for this part, so the lossy part is the meat of this post.

I'm probably going to divide the lossy category into two subcategories: DVD9->DVD5 for movies where the retention of some extras and "navigable" DVD bits is necessary, and XviD/H.264 for movies where the main feature is enough.

This is where my knowledge ends. There are so many movies that I don't want to spend too much time tweaking individual rips for best possible quality, so I need some general guidelines. Actual questions:

1. Codec: Should I go with XviD or some H.264 variant for the "main feature only" movies? Relevant issues: quality/disk space, openness, quality of encoders, cross-platform compatibility, expected longevity of the format.

2. Continuing from the last question, what if the main feature fits on a DVD5 without recompression? Then it's really only a matter of HD space: 4+ gigs for the original MPEG2, or X gigs for a lossily encoded format. How big would an H.264 encoded movie file have to be before the loss of quality is near-imperceptible from the original? How about XviD? (Obviously I'm not going to scale the picture down from its original dimensions, i.e. 720x576 for PAL movies which most of my DVDs are.)

3. Container format: Matroska is very flexible with multiple audio and subtitle tracks, but sparsely supported by stand-alone players. Currently I'm using Xbox Media Center which works fine, but there's no telling what I'll use in the future. AVI seems too limited, and I don't really know much about MP4. The factors of question 1 apply. Which one should I pick?

4. Audio encoding: I'll want to preserve multi-channel audio: usually DD5.1, but preferably DTS when available. Can VBR MP3 handle these, or do I have to include the audio track as-is even if the video is XviD or H.264? AVI doesn't support multi-channel (IIRC), any caveats with other containers?

Any other relevant considerations are welcome, too. I have access to Mac, Windows and Linux computers, so I'll be able to use pretty much whatever tools you suggest.