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Media preservation is a problem. Formats and hardware that were still current and available yesterday, may have completely disappeared from the face of this planet tomorrow.

Sounds strange, but that's the way it is. (Tell my 8 years old me about VHS tapes …)

And if you ever tried to scratch that one game from the early 80s off a 5.25 inch floppy disk, you might fail, because of the ancient compression format used by the ingenious developers of the time to save exactly 12 expensive bytes on the disk.

Twilio Engineer Teemu Suutari has taken on this problem, and re-implemented a really large set of these algorithms in modern C++17. In doing so, he has run his implementation against a large set of test archives and makes his project available under a BSD license.

His project ancient is real gold dust, that you will definitely need sooner or later.