Getting files off a PPC Mac

[Eric Idle]

I have a Quadra 630 that has not been fired up since I retired it to buy a new G4 eMac. I seem to recall that I had some letters compressed with Compact Pro on the HDD for that Mac.

What are the chances this could be fired up, that file uncompressed, and transferred to my current Mac? I would have to get a monitor and mouse for the computer, but have no idea how to get the files off of it. Is it even safe to try to power it up?

Please advise you PPC experts!

 

[repairedCheese]

Well, for one thing, a Quadra 630 is a 68k Mac, not a PowerPC Mac. That does make things a little bit more of a challenge. The software you used only seems to support Mac OS 9 and below, so that doesn't make things easier.

Basically, I have to ask, how comfortable are you at using floppy disks? Do you have anything else with a floppy drive? A usb floppy drive, perhaps? Because it looks like the easiest solution would be to decompress the files on the old Mac, move them to floppy, then copy them on the newer Mac. Pretty much anything else gets wild stuff like emulation involved, and you'd still have to use a floppy anyway.

The good news is that the software used to compress the files is still available:

https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/compact-pro

It also looks like Stuffit was, at one point at least, capable of decompressing these files, but I can't make any promises about current versions. And you'd need to get the files off the 68k Mac, which brings us back to floppies.

Also, do you know what was used to write these letters? Because if we're just moving and trying to decompress these files, you may end up with something you can't read afterwards.

This is the tricky business of really old Macs, things weren't meant to come out of that ecosystem, and floppies were just assumed to be a constant. Well that, scsi, apple desktop bus, and apple serial ports.

 

[repairedCheese]

Actually, I do have another option. And it's only really one because Apple got cheap with the Quadra 630. The hard drive inside the machine uses ide, not scsi, so an ide to usb adaptor would work with it, and I believe current versions of the Mac OS can still read hfs partitions. But that's about the only other option for getting files off the thing I can really think of.

 

[AL1630]

I was going to suggest using an IDE adapter as well, that's probably the least clunky way of doing it. Of course there is still the issue of decompressing the files.

If you do decide to power it up, I would open up the case first and just visually check everything to make sure nothing has leaked/exploded in the last 15 years.

 

[repairedCheese]

I was going to suggest using an IDE adapter as well, that's probably the least clunky way of doing it. Of course there is still the issue of decompressing the files.

If you do decide to power it up, I would open up the case first and just visually check everything to make sure nothing has leaked/exploded in the last 15 years.

Yeah, most of the time I spent with 68k Macs was with machines with scsi drives, or floppy only. I kind of forgot they made the swap for a bit there.

But opening the machine and checking capacitors and the battery is also a very good piece of advice. Something is likely to have started to go bad by now.

 

[Eric Idle]

Thanks for all the help! I forgot that the Quandra 630 was a 68k Mac! That was so long ago. The files I compressed were exported out of Eudora, which I think put them into text edit format, or what was the precursor to text edit. The compressed files were simply emails.