I know we all have a story or two. How many hard lessons from DIY? How many from paid IT services? lol?!

I have been refurbishing and upgrading some computers recently. I have learned over the years that cloning a HDD or a backup equivalent is time consuming but better to have it and not need it. I experimented with different types of old/new media recently. HDD/SSD/Flash also thinking of creating a CD/DVD PE with an external partition for fun.

A son and grandson have expressed interest in learning and reviving older tech and integrating with newer.
My oldest grandson remembers things like A/V cassettes, burning discs, etc. My son remembers boot disks for PC games and dial-up. So I have been digging through my archives of hardware/software. I was able to create a clone on a bootable flash drive for and old OS needing more than 64 GB from my son's old laptop. It's slower than molasses on boot but an exact duplicate just in case. An hdd/ssd would be better but way more expensive right now. I have a spare of each I used to upgrade fresh and incrementally to record it in the "Clouds" for insurance.

Now I intend to upgrade hardware in the machines to upgrade to a newer OS. Waiting for new RAM and an SSD. This is intended to show them the next level of interfacing raspberry PI and other type projects that led us on this path to install the software needed to interface the device.

In my searching the catacombs and archives I've found some forgotten things on a couple old HDD's. Even within backups within backups. I saved some of it kind of like old photo albums to look through. I'm trying to compile some stuff for the kids. Stuff they forgot about too. At the same time try to newly Archive old vcr/dvr and phone videos, music and video downloads in old formats. (Merci Beaucoup VLC! btw)

Some old drives are going to be disassembled for learning and scrap. Motors, Magnets, and Platters are fun to repurpose. PCB's of all sorts have components to learn from and to salvage/scrap too.

I know I'm probably more of an enthusiast in this type of endeavor than most here, but I'd bet everyone has a 'techie' part of them. All you old techies out there we're going to need you. It's going to revive new innovation by teaching and preserving old ways. Human experience has wisdom that AI will never have in accumulated knowledge.

Yes / No ?