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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

#41

Post by officeplant »

demute wrote: post #11

Efficient market hypothesis applied to this topic would say that if you really do have a floppy, you should already have made a copy of it. If that’s Not the case, transform it to a punched card and be done with it. 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.

>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.

Except the fact that there is still tons of old un-archived software out there in the wild because we used floppies for decades.

One of the greatest things about the retro computing community is when they buy or find old software they tend to try to image it and put it up on archive.org.

So much software has already been lost to time unfortunately.

Re: Copy That Floppy – Cambridge guide for preserving data from fragile floppy disks

#42

Post by anjackson »

hypercube33 wrote: post #32
Dwedit wrote: post #31

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.

Dont most disks have write protection? Would that not be sufficient?

Unfortunately, some USB floppy drives ignore the read-write tab. It's not enforced at the hardware level.

Re: Copy That Floppy – Cambridge guide for preserving data from fragile floppy disks

#44

Post by AkBKukU »

I do a lot of floppy imaging and some of my work on it has previously be discussed here[1]. I do not understand where they got the idea of "there are a number of disks that the Greaseweazle struggles to capture, namely the Apple formatted disks. If you have these disks in your collection, you may need to use an Applesauce controller."

The Applesauce is a macOS exclusive tool that has a contingent of dedicated users. While I have not imaged a wide sample set of Apple II and 800k Mac disks specifically, from my current experience the Greaseweazle is plenty capable of reading them. I would speculate the author was trying to use an included diskdef(a flux to binary decoding definition) for an incompatible disk. The Zone Bit Recording[2] Apple drives use is irrelevant when you increase the sample rate of the controller to accomplish the same thing. Similarly C64 disk drives are also ZBR but change the clock rate instead of media speed. So do not think that this means you need multiple drives and controllers when getting into floppy imaging, you can use standard PC drives with a Greaseweazle to read and write Apple II and Mac disks as well as almost anything else.

I have opened an issue on their github page for this site to seek clarification on this.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39495973 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_bit_recording

Re: Copy That Floppy – Cambridge guide for preserving data from fragile floppy disks

#45

Post by [deleted] »

demute wrote: post #11

Efficient market hypothesis applied to this topic would say that if you really do have a floppy, you should already have made a copy of it. If that’s Not the case, transform it to a punched card and be done with it. 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.

[deleted]

Re: Copy That Floppy – Cambridge guide for preserving data from fragile floppy disks

#46

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

bartread wrote: post #37
felooboolooomba wrote: post #28

As 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…

I thought https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniDisc like that. But, too little too late for too much money.

But conceptually, haptically, optically...phenomenally!

Re: Copy That Floppy – Cambridge guide for preserving data from fragile floppy disks

#48

Post by actionfromafar »

bartread wrote: post #37
felooboolooomba wrote: post #28

As 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…

The 1200 is a little weird in that it can also use HD floppies.

Re: Copy That Floppy – Cambridge guide for preserving data from fragile floppy disks

#49

Post by mikestew »

Balooga wrote: post #47

FYI; In South Africa, the 5 1/4 inch is a "floppy". The 3 1/2 inch is a "stiffy". I don't understand why this isn't so everywhere.

Colloquially it might be correct, but not technically correct. The “floppy” part never referred to the casing, but the media inside.

Re: Copy That Floppy – Cambridge guide for preserving data from fragile floppy disks

#50

Post by bartread »

LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #46
bartread wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I thought https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniDisc like that. But, too little too late for too much money. But conceptually, haptically, optically...phenomenally!

Yeah, it's funny they never really took off as a data storage format the way zip disks and CDs did.

To me a MiniDisc would have been far better than a Zip disk but I never encountered MiniDisc used in that context. Certainly, whereas all the machines in the computer lab during my masters had Zip drives and floppy drives, making Zip the logical choice for my home PC, I don't ever remember seeing a PC with a built-in MiniDisc drive anywhere at all - not even in computer shops.

Shame really. I'm sure they probably existed but maybe rarely enough that they'd classify as oddware? (HT to LGR for that piece of terminology.)

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