I've got quite a few old ClarisWorks files as well. At some point I realized all that data would become unreadable (at least not easily) when that file format becomes unsupported. So I went through every ClarisWorks file (with a script) and saved it out into multiple formats (e.g. RTF, PDF). The hope was at least one of those would open...
Batch re-encoding those files at the cusp of losing easy access to them turned out to be a lot of possibly error prone work. So to future-proof important documents, now I do that re-encoding continuously up front, whenever those files are saved.
But for long term viability, on top of backups, the files themselves have to be in a format usable by programs that will be around for a long time on platforms that won't disappear.
Practically, that means using simple file formats (TXT). Or else using a program (LibreOffice) that creates files in an open format that can be easily re-encoded up front into multiple formats like DOC and PDF. The MultiFormatSave extension for LibreOffice makes it easy to save into multiple formats for that purpose.
After all that work though, I just found out LibreOffice can open ClarisWorks files. lol...
Batch re-encoding those files at the cusp of losing easy access to them turned out to be a lot of possibly error prone work. So to future-proof important documents, now I do that re-encoding continuously up front, whenever those files are saved.
But for long term viability, on top of backups, the files themselves have to be in a format usable by programs that will be around for a long time on platforms that won't disappear.
Practically, that means using simple file formats (TXT). Or else using a program (LibreOffice) that creates files in an open format that can be easily re-encoded up front into multiple formats like DOC and PDF. The MultiFormatSave extension for LibreOffice makes it easy to save into multiple formats for that purpose.
After all that work though, I just found out LibreOffice can open ClarisWorks files. lol...