Digital preservation query

[Gardener]

I just came across this advice about digital preservation of photographs and stuff in general.

http://alanake.wordpress.com/so-you-want-to-keep-all-your-stuff/

To be honest, just reading the instructions made me feel tired 

It also reminded me of a vague uneasiness about document naming.
Two years ago a university lecturer told my class that when her computer's hard-drive crashed, she was informed that files which began with a capital letter or a number would be be retrievable.

Does anyone know if this is true? 

[nickgc]

Hi - the digital preservation article seems pretty straightforward and correct.  I disagree that older formats will automatically be beyond recovery.  Where there is demand for a service there will usually be someone willing fill that demand.  I took messages sent to my mom from my dad in WWII on reel to reel tape and copied them onto cassette in the early 1970s.  They have since been digitized.
Look at all the old film that was converted from reels or Super-8 to VCRs then CD/DVD.

I don't know why the lecturer would imply that only certain naming conventions would allow recovery of files... doesn't sound logical.  The way hard disks work gives a specified area for file names (directory).  You can delete a file and it simply nulls the first letter so that until the area is overwritten, tools can be used to change the name back to a readable name that can then be viewed, copied, etc.  The data doesn't necessarily disappear with a drive crash.  I am willing to be corrected on this since I have worked on individual file deletion recovery for almost 30 years, but haven't had to deal with recovering a crashed drive.

Nick

   

[Gardener]

Thanks for the reply.

Perhaps it is a matter of being recoverable in an economic frame? So that commercial companies only get what what is easy?