I want to find a copy of my 1997 honors thesis.1 I wrote it on a Power Mac 7500 in Word Perfect 3.5 on the classic Mac OS 8. It probably fit on a floppy drive, but I know I saved a backup copy of it on a Zip drive. At some point, I decided that I needed to move things off the Zip disks and consolidated all of my old files from college onto DVDs. I’m not 100% sure where that DVD is now, but I’m guessing it’s in my attic. Even if the disc hasn’t been ruined by the South Carolina heat, I don’t actually have a DVD drive to read it.

And then I remembered that the University of South Carolina library has the official copy in the off-site annex. I can request that they pull the physical copy for me to review in person at South Carolinina Library. It’s a bound copy of the actual sheets of paper I printed and turned in at Harper College almost 30 years ago. I’m going to request it next week and we’ll see how long it takes to get it out of storage.2

I suppose the moral of the story is don’t trust your archives to digital formats. A lot can go wrong.

Bob Wertz is a type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina. He’s been blogging since 2008.

  1. To graduate from the University of South Carolina Honors College, you had to write an undergraduate thesis. Mine was on media branding. ↩︎

  2. I’ll share some pictures when I get to see it. ↩︎