The rule for preserving floppies is to not use Windows. Windows is known for automatically writing to disks, so you're not preserving the original anymore, you're preserving the changes that Windows made to the disk.
Copy That Floppy – Cambridge guide for preserving data from fragile floppy disks
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Re: Copy That Floppy – Cambridge guide for preserving data from fragile floppy disks
#32The rule for preserving floppies is to not use Windows . Windows is known for automatically writing to disks, so you're not preserving the original anymore, you're preserving the changes that Windows made to the disk.
Dont most disks have write protection? Would that not be sufficient?
Re: Copy That Floppy – Cambridge guide for preserving data from fragile floppy disks
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
> when the company goes under > when the accounts stop being paid I've never experienced such case, did you? Something much more likely is for a person to drop their phone into the toilet, buy a new one, and completely lose access to their only backup which is Google Photos, because they don't own a computer anymore and it is their only device.
I lost the only recordings of my band when Myspace Music died. At one point, I also had files on RapidShare. They probably weren't of any value, but I have no idea what they were now.
[dead]
Re: Copy That Floppy – Cambridge guide for preserving data from fragile floppy disks
#34"Don't copy that floppy" is deeply ingrained in my head rent-free!
Re: Copy That Floppy – Cambridge guide for preserving data from fragile floppy disks
#35I tried such systems in the past and the success was limited. When floppy was replaced with image reader, the device wouldn't read half of them. But it would read the floppies just fine. I wonder if anything has changed since. I tried Greaseweazle (few versions) and Kryoflux with multiple different floppy drives.
Re: Copy That Floppy – Cambridge guide for preserving data from fragile floppy disks
#36As a kid back then, floppies were expensive if you were using your pocket money or hard earned side hustle stash. Floppies were used, abused and reused until that dreadful bad sector. Even after the bad sector if you knew its location. But you knew the floppy time was up. Kids today will newer know the feeling of unwrapping a fresh package of 10 floppies. The sound, the smell, the texture, the stickers, the formattin…
Perhaps it's similar to the feeling of unwrapping a pack of CD-Rs
Re: Copy That Floppy – Cambridge guide for preserving data from fragile floppy disks
#37As a kid back then, floppies were expensive if you were using your pocket money or hard earned side hustle stash. Floppies were used, abused and reused until that dreadful bad sector. Even after the bad sector if you knew its location. But you knew the floppy time was up. Kids today will newer know the feeling of unwrapping a fresh package of 10 floppies. The sound, the smell, the texture, the stickers, the formattin…
There was a time when, for me at least, the 3.5 inch floppy seemed like the pinnacle of portable storage technology, especially as compared to the cassettes and 5.25 inch floppies I’d been used to.
I made regular use of 3.5 inch disks as portable storage up until, if you can believe it, 2000 when I mostly switched to Zip disks and, occasionally, CDRs. I never found CDRWs that useful.
Writable CD storage was always a bit of a faff to use though, whereas Zip disks behave exactly like floppies, only a lot bigger.
Fast forward to 2002 when I first got home broadband, and it just became easier to simply transfer files directly over the internet rather than toting disks around.
Not long after that cheap USB sticks started to get usefully large but, really, I’ve barely used them in 20-odd years.
It’s funny how, once floppies became too small for most practical uses - even though I’d used them exclusively for 10 years - I didn’t spend much time with anything else before jumping to just relying on the network for file sharing, syncing, and transfers.
Very occasionally I do still use them today: I’ve got an old Korg Trinity synth that uses 3.5 inch floppies for storage, and I’ve got a minty fresh box of them still hanging around in my office. I’ve also got an Amiga 1200 that uses DD as opposed to HD floppies.
Re: Copy That Floppy – Cambridge guide for preserving data from fragile floppy disks
#38If you ever want to peek at physical magnetic transitions and how that translates into bits/bytes/sectors get any Sigrok supported Logic Analyser and the FM/MFM/RLL decoder https://github.com/raszpl/sigrok-disk#screenshots
Re: Copy That Floppy – Cambridge guide for preserving data from fragile floppy disks
#39I recall installing Slackware from floppy.
Re: Copy That Floppy – Cambridge guide for preserving data from fragile floppy disks
#40This is also an internal team name for the doctors in charge of preserving Elon Musk’s lineage.