11–20 of 75 posts
The chance that one would have anything important on a floppy that is not already backed up in the year of 2026 must be close to zero.
Floppy disks were ubiquitous when I was in college. When I got into Linux, I did an experiment raw writing zeros to floppies with dd to see what percentage of them had I/O errors. I tested with a stack of about 50 of them that were left in our computer lab over the years (different brands). The failure rate was staggering. Something like 30-40% of them had bad sectors. After that, I realized that I could never rely o…
Floppy disks were ubiquitous when I was in college. When I got into Linux, I did an experiment raw writing zeros to floppies with dd to see what percentage of them had I/O errors. I tested with a stack of about 50 of them that were left in our computer lab over the years (different brands). The failure rate was staggering. Something like 30-40% of them had bad sectors. After that, I realized that I could never rely o…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Generally it's easier to just copy the data to each new media as you adopt it. In the past this was pretty easy to do as the hard drive held way more data than the floppy disks of old. The next hard drive was an order of magnitude larger than the old one, and so on. Unfortunately this sputtered out during the SSD transition and became even more ephemeral as people started putting data in the cloud where it will event…
> The next hard drive was an order of magnitude larger than the old one, and so on. Ah yes, the good old "old PC" folder that you would find on pretty much every Windows PC that used to have another "old PC" folder inside it somewhere, possibly inside an "external HDD (old)" folder :-) Until the PC (or the HDD inside it) died surprisingly, people didn't have backups, or the backups turned out to be burned CDs that we…
I also used to back up other PCs to each other somewhat regularly, and sometimes I'd end up with those files back on the original PC in a backup of another. Fortunately, when I switched to borgbackup on Windows as well [1], this massive reduplication of files became a solved problem.
[1] borgbackup doesn't officially work on Windows, but I run it in WSL which does reasonably well for all the files I really care about (i.e. the stuff I've made). When they have particular unusual characters in the filenames, it throws up a warning for that file every time, but otherwise seems fine. I've never bothered investigating whether those particular files restore to the correct filename, because I know I've also backed up the zip file those files have come from and it's just accidental that I've backed up the extracted files as well.
Floppy disks were ubiquitous when I was in college. When I got into Linux, I did an experiment raw writing zeros to floppies with dd to see what percentage of them had I/O errors. I tested with a stack of about 50 of them that were left in our computer lab over the years (different brands). The failure rate was staggering. Something like 30-40% of them had bad sectors. After that, I realized that I could never rely o…
But with older drives and older media, produced to a higher standard, they were pretty reliable. (After all, IBM invented them to store CPU microcode, they had to be.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Generally it's easier to just copy the data to each new media as you adopt it. In the past this was pretty easy to do as the hard drive held way more data than the floppy disks of old. The next hard drive was an order of magnitude larger than the old one, and so on. Unfortunately this sputtered out during the SSD transition and became even more ephemeral as people started putting data in the cloud where it will event…
> The next hard drive was an order of magnitude larger than the old one, and so on. Ah yes, the good old "old PC" folder that you would find on pretty much every Windows PC that used to have another "old PC" folder inside it somewhere, possibly inside an "external HDD (old)" folder :-) Until the PC (or the HDD inside it) died surprisingly, people didn't have backups, or the backups turned out to be burned CDs that we…