Success Rates for Retrieving Content from Digital Media Carriers

COM/CON: Binary indicator if media was written commercially (e.g. commercially produced software) or by a consumer (e.g. media written on a home computer). I'd describe this indicator as unreliable, often based on personal judgement. SUCCESS Y/N: Binary indicator if media was successfully accessed.

Success was defined as an imaging attempt producing a mountable disk image and the extraction of at least one logical file. A note on estimated age: Age was derived from publication date for published media, and from the oldest file timestamp for manuscript media. Wildly erroneous or placeholder timestamp dates (e.g., future dates like 2040, or default system timestamps such as January 1, 1980) were identified through manual review and replaced with the mean age for comparable media within the same collection.

This imputation was applied to 75 carriers (1.5% of the dataset). Media age in the dataset ranged from 1 to 36 years at the time of access, with most carriers clustering between 15 and 30 years old.