Moving files from os 8 to 10.4.11

[ert3]

My grand father is the king of all pack rats as he still keeps all his taxes and personal files on a powermac 600/66.

He wants to move the files off that computer and onto one of his newer macs so that the older powermac can finally be laid to rest.

The power Mac has a floppy drive which I am hopping I can use in tandem with a USB floppy drive for one of his newer macs so that no data is lost.

It seems like a viable plan I just want to know what issues I might run into as he is convinced the only way to transfer the documents will be via printer to scanner.

 

[spinnerlys]

You might run into compatibility issues with the documents per se, as they could be in an older and unsupported version of whatever software he uses.

 

[mysterytramp]

An alternative might be to find a USB to SCSI cable. You'd probably get the transfer done a lot quicker -- though I guess there's a question whether the Powermac will recognize, say, a thumbdrive. But if it works, it will save you a lot of floppy-swapping.

mt

 

[Ganesha]

What kind of macs does the have around? You many be able to use a middle generation Mac as a bridge.

That old mac (assuming you mean the 6100/66) does have an AAUI ethernet on the Mac. Tho it might be hard to find an AAUI adapter.

 

[JavierP]

My grand father is the king of all pack rats as he still keeps all his taxes and personal files on a powermac 600/66.

He wants to move the files off that computer and onto one of his newer macs so that the older powermac can finally be laid to rest.

The power Mac has a floppy drive which I am hopping I can use in tandem with a USB floppy drive for one of his newer macs so that no data is lost.

It seems like a viable plan I just want to know what issues I might run into as he is convinced the only way to transfer the documents will be via printer to scanner.

Don't you have a PC with a floppy drive and network around?

 

[mkaake]

The floppy method works fine (and it's what I've done in the past). It's quick to set up, and works well (albeit slowly, depending on how many files you're moving). The up-side is that back in 6100/66 days, file sizes from programs were much smaller, so it shouldn't take too long to move over all of the files.

If you don't mind tinkering a little bit more, since you're still running 10.4 on your newer mac, you can get both talking to each other via appletalk over ethernet. If you have a large number of files to move, it would be the faster method; though I couldn't personally guide you through it (it's been several years since I transferred data from my old macs, and 10.6 doesn't support appletalk anymore, so I can't give it a whack on my current machine).

<edit> as an aside, Ganesha is correct that you'd need an AAUI adaptor - so if you don't have one handy, it might just be faster to use floppies.

 

[ert3]

just to hop in with more details no we dont have any middle generation macs with built in floppy drives just an old old apple laptop.

Also the 600/66 only has a connection so that we could connect it to a dial up network which im not really willing to go looking for as we never had it from the get go. (ebay supper starts may post links)

I guess the main fear at this phase is the possibility i might have to use the classic environment present in 10.4 in order to run an old OS 8 application incase data transfer is really that difficult.

 

[mkaake]

USB floppy drives work just fine in X, so you won't need to use classic to get things working.