I just spoke with Cynthia about the gallery. More on that in my next email but my talk with her reminded me of a thread that developed here a while back about archiving files. Coincidentally, just today I received a post from the International Occultation Timing Association's listserve referring to an online article about the subject. See it here: http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_10235132?IADID=A0 While I routinely back up data files on my Macs (and store those backups in 2 and sometimes 3 places) I've only recently started giving serious thought to backing up stuff on the old Windows box I had to get to run the Paramount. After reading the above I'm giving it even more thought but the article has me a bit spooked. And so I turn to the computer whizzes here on UA for opinions. With drives becoming so cheap I _was_ going to just get an external hard drive to back up to and continue to back up to DVDs. But the article refers to hard drives crashing and DVDs becoming unrecoverable. Over the years I've accumulated a veritable museum of Macs going back to my first (a MacPlus) from 1984. They all still work fine (though, admittedly, I only turn on the oldest one every now and then just to see if it still works). Even the Windows box I bought from Super Dell in '99 still works (albeit maybe a bit slowly) and it gets used many hours every week. So, my questions to the computer gurus on the groups are: Is the article being overly pessimistic or have I just been lucky? And, what do you do to protect files you plan on keeping for a very long time? Your thoughts? Many thanks, patrick the paranoid p.s. The above has nothing to do with the problems discussed in the previous UA thread about new machines not being able to read files created on old machines.