Herb - The backstory is that I wanted to bring a “Mac on a Stick” to my mom’s house and show her the old files and things from when she taught English at the middle school in her town (she’s long retired now). There’s a lot of interesting stuff she collected and some very creative things she did using PageMaker. So, I created a vMac environment on a thumb drive that actually matched her system (MacSE, 100MB drive, all the same software). The original programs exist on-line (I have most of the disks too) but I needed the data. But, you bring up an excellent point about data migration in general. I’ve done it a handful of times on individual files and it requires multiple machines running different versions of the program. For example, migrating a Word for Mac 1.0 document with formatting requires it being passed through at least two versions to get it “modern” enough to work. Or even like an old WordPerfect 5 doc on the PC. And that doesn’t even cover a file on an old S100 machine where there is a migration “dead end” like WordStar. Those you just need to find the “lowest common denominator” file and bring that over. Rich http://www.classiccmp.org/cini Long Island S100 User’s Group Get Outlook<https://aka.ms/qtex0l> for iOS ________________________________ From: vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic-bounces@lists.vcfed.org> on behalf of Herb Johnson via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> Sent: Thursday, September 17, 2020 11:46:19 PM To: vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> Cc: Herb Johnson <hjohnson@retrotechnology.info> Subject: Re: [vcf-midatlantic] Moving files from an old 68k-Mac to an emulator or other machine Rich Cini says: have an old System 7 or 8 Mac, it put files on a Mac format ZIP disk. Then run a recent-enough OSX (pre 10.15) Mac that can read the ZIP disk via a USB ZIP drive. OK, got that. But I got lost when Rich said "use an emulator to get the files into the emulation environment". Rich, were/are you trying to copy files onto some modern computer, to make use of them with modern software? Or ... copy files ... to *run* them under some emulation of say Mac System 7? Or, both? People ask me about such things often enough. It would be good if I can tell them what they may be able to do. Most people won't want to run an emulator, they just want to migrate old files or at least archive it. I always warn them of the problem of old programs that make files, that new programs can't read (even if you "copy" them over to the new computer). regards, Herb -- Herbert R. Johnson, New Jersey in the USA http://www.retrotechnology.com OR .net preserve, recover, restore 1970's computing email: hjohnson AT retrotechnology DOT com or try later herbjohnson AT retrotechnology DOT info