Good to see this is being discussed. It's a bit ancient in itself, but I talked about excavating hard drives, and the issue of how to read old data, in a chapter in Artifacts: an archaeologist's year in Silicon Valley (MIT Press 2001). 

There's a related paper, which I gave with Sellam Ismail at a computer and tech conf in Vienna that year: 'The Valley of Lost Data: Excavating Hard Drives and Floppy Discs'.

It should be archived in proceedings online

The issue of lost data has preoccupied computer collectors for a long while. and I celebrate their forward-thinking in a chapter on Silicon Valley in the Oxford Handbook to the Archaeology of the Contemporary World (OUP, 2013) eds Harrison, Graves-Brown, Piccini.

 

I also talk about it in a 4-episode BBC Radio 3 doc series, "It"s Big and it's Beautiful" about the rise of retro tech. It should be out there somewhere - on bit torrent? 

And the issue of lost manuscripts, especially with regard to writing future biographies, in a programme on BBC Radio 4, "Tales from the Digital Archive"http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b010m9sw