There’s a lot going on right now with my personal nerd projects and part of it involves retiring the web and file server that’s been serving me well for what feels like forever now. It’s been a good run, Windows Server 2008!
As I’m getting ready to shut it down, I’m taking some time to go through all my old files and clear out stuff I’ll never need again.
In that ancient stuff I found some old CorelDRAW files I made back in the mid to late 90’s. The oldest is dated October 4th, 1995.
It stands to reason that none of the software I have today would open them. The kicker here though is that apparently even COREL software won’t read them anymore and it seems like they’ve made a business model out of dropping support for older file formats on a regular basis.
If you use CorelDRAW, apparently you have to open and resave all the files you want to keep or you’ll never be able to open them again. Way to punish your long time users, Corel!!
Anyhow, in a thread on the CorelDRAW community forums that started “over 15 years ago” and has a latest post from “over 2 years ago” I found a little tidbit that I hope to pass on to others in the same predicament.
There’s a site called cloudconvert and they are able to convert the ancient .cdr files to .svg format and did a fine job of it.
You can find the converter here: https://cloudconvert.com/cdr-to-svg
Finally, here’s a rainbow I drew for some reason in 1996.
Sadly, this seems to be part of the business model most design software is following now. I stopped upgrading my Adobe suite once they switched to a subscription-based model. For now, my Adobe software from before the change still works, but it’s a matter of time before that’s no longer the case.
I like the rainbow. Added some sunshine to my day 🙂
It’s my understanding that Adobe is the example to follow in this particular respect. Like… they can suck it for their subscription model, but from what I read when figuring out these .cdr files, current Adobe software can still open files made with their very earliest versions and may even still be able to export to those versions.
Corel, on the other hand, has actively turned their users’ old files into a waste of bits.