What is your longest lasting Apple product?

[MacBH928]

Back up is the only solution and it works...

Q-6

Backup works but its annoying to keep sticking HDDs on a flat surface, attaching them and de-attaching them especially for laptops. Also if your files are scattered its annoying to pick each file to back it up. Cloud backups are amazingly convenient though, but I do not think those work on older machines with older software.

I currently use the trouble-free CarbonCopyCloner and backup the whole drive. Unfortunately, do to some recently Apple methodologies the backups are no longer bootable.

To a degree, during the time I had the SE, there was no/little choice, due to cash flow issues. If something happened the SE, I'd have been using a typewriter again... That lean period probably is one reason why I later would purposely keep using something until it was pretty much run into the earth.



That is a real problem and worry. My big concern are word processor documents--and I have documents going back to the 1980s that were created by long forgotten products. At one time, I thought I'd probably have vintage Macs around in semi-regular use forever for archival purposes. Fortunately, LibreOffice does a pretty good job now of opening old files.

I now heavily use plain text editors. One selling point: the thought that the files are more likely to be something that can be easily opened forever than any word processor format.

Yeah text files seems to last forever and most portable, but they lack formatting. HTML though seems like it will never die, albeit word processors do not display html files but they should imo at least via some sort of an import function.

Which obsolete file formats you had that Libreoffice could open? I am surprised by this. It would have been great if it could open just MS word no issues.

 

[WriteNow]

Yeah text files seems to last forever and most portable, but they lack formatting.

The formatting is the annoyance... But I figure at least the content is still there, and that's the #1 thing I worry about.

Which obsolete file formats you had that Libreoffice could open? I am surprised by this.

I was surprised when this feature got added to LibreOffice.

Most old documents I open are WriteNow documents. But I sometimes open documents created in my early years of Mac use, which were created with Microsoft Works. [Pause to shudder at the memory of using Works.]

I also have some documents created by ClarisWorks, but I'm not sure I've ever opened any with LibreOffice. (I was using WriteNow by the time I got ClarisWorks--and never saw any reason to switch to ClarisWorks. I used it mainly when I needed to do light page layout.)

I can't remember this for certain--but I think LibreOffice has support for Word documents so old that Word no longer supports them!