I took a lot of photos with a lot of people during the late 90’s. I wonder if those backup CDs in storage are still good.

  • Iunnrais@piefed.social
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    1 day ago

    Assuming that as an older millennial, I’m the parent you’re talking about, no. Porn almost never went on those. VHS and paper magazines mostly. Computer porn would be downloaded to a convoluted folder depth with misleading names on your hard drive, and would never be placed on removable media unless you had a CD burner, which was rare as fuck (but they did exist).

    Seriously though, people used to make genuine mazes out of nested folders.

    If you were in the era of dial up BBS systems, you still were far more likely to use a hard drive than a floppy. The reason floppies weren’t used is that even at low resolution with still images, not much would fit on the things, super inconvenient. Shareware, sure. Porn? Not likely.

    • lightnsfw@reddthat.com
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      15 hours ago

      I used floppies. The only PC in the house with interet was shared by 5 people and I didn’t trust that the folder maze method would actually work. I eventually set up our old PC in my bedroom but I didn’t have Internet on it. On that one I hid my porn folder in the program files for Microsoft Money.

    • northface@lemmy.ml
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      21 hours ago

      I can confirm the existance of said mazes of nested folders. Also renaming files to have the wrong extension for the file type, to prevent anyone else from finding them.

      • fun_times@lemmy.world
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        16 hours ago

        Windows sold me out by having a “Recently viewed files” section on the start menu that I had not noticed. Luckily, it was my friends that found it and not my parents.

        Still, though, being caught red-handed with badly photoshopped fake nudes of Britney Spears was quite embarrassing for teenage me.

      • gizmonicus@sh.itjust.works
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        16 hours ago

        Back before searching for files was built into the file explorer in Windows, I created a folder scheme where each directory had 10 subfolders named 0-9. You needed the “pin” to find the right one. It was good for maybe 4 deep? before it the folder creation script fell apart.

        Disclaimer: this was so long ago, and this post triggered the memory, so I honestly can’t remember if this was just an idea I had that didn’t work, or if it was a real thing I managed to pull off with some basic batch scripting. Either way though, the folder decoy thing was real.