Don't copy that floppy! - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up863eQKGUI
I love watching old Computer Chronicals episodes and seeing that warning from the Software Publishers Association.
Copy That Floppy – Cambridge guide for preserving data from fragile floppy disks
51–60 of 75 posts
Re: Copy That Floppy – Cambridge guide for preserving data from fragile floppy disks
#52The 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.
If you're using Kryoflux or a similar controller solution (and they mention several) it should bypass this problem since then the drive doesn't show up as a normal floppy drive at all. So in this case it shouldn't matter.
Re: Copy That Floppy – Cambridge guide for preserving data from fragile floppy disks
#53Earlier 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…
The 1200 is a little weird in that it can also use HD floppies.
Whoa, wait, what? It can? I did not know that. Back in the day I had an A500, and only bought the 1200 decades later. Had no idea it would accept HD floppies. TIL. Thank you!
Re: Copy That Floppy – Cambridge guide for preserving data from fragile floppy disks
#54Earlier 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…
> 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.
What are you talking about? This is extremely common. Try hunting for some 15+ year old piece of obscure software or especially a driver for old hardware on the Internet and you are always hitting domain parking pages and "file no longer available".
Re: Copy That Floppy – Cambridge guide for preserving data from fragile floppy disks
#55As 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…
The jump from 1.44MB on a 3.5 floppy to a 650MB CD was astonishing.
Re: Copy That Floppy – Cambridge guide for preserving data from fragile floppy disks
#56A few years back I underwent an effort to image a bunch of old 3.5” floppies I had from when I was a kid. I used KryoFlux, and had a close to 100% success rate (eventually)
Some things I learned:
1. Different drives could read different sectors. I am not exactly sure why, but some disks would show bad sectors when read from one drive, but would have a different set of bad sectors when read from a different one. I had 5-6 different drives I was using (I bought a bunch of used drives, they are pulled from old hardware and resold). I think it likely has something to do with the heads being slightly misaligned or something, so they would struggle with different sectors.
What I would do is scan a disk with one drive, and if I found any bad sectors, I would re-scan with a different drive. I would repeat this process until I had at least one good scan of each sector. I would then pull the missing sectors in one scan from a scan that succeeded on that sector, and would patch together an entire image.
2. I didn’t realize how varied the formats are for disks I had. I remember single vs double sided, but there were quite a few other variations I found in my collection.
3. If you hang out with computer nerds of a certain age, you are going to be surprised by how many of them still have a collection of old floppies that they can’t access anymore. I had so many requests to help archive many different collections!
Re: Copy That Floppy – Cambridge guide for preserving data from fragile floppy disks
#57Earlier 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!
I was a big MiniDisc fan. They were like digital cassette tapes. I could record from the radio, trim out the DJ, re-order the tracks, and give them titles. Looking back, it was all a bit tedious to do on the player/recorder itself, but paired with modern software and a reader for the PC, I'm sure it would be outstanding.
Re: Copy That Floppy – Cambridge guide for preserving data from fragile floppy disks
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
The 1200 is a little weird in that it can also use HD floppies.
Whoa, wait, what? It can? I did not know that. Back in the day I had an A500, and only bought the 1200 decades later. Had no idea it would accept HD floppies. TIL. Thank you!
It can't. The GP is mistaken.
The stock A1200 floppy drive cannot read/write HD disks, though you can format most HD disks as DD and physically use them as DD (depending on the brand of floppy disk; back in the late 1990s I used to buy HD floppies because they were the only ones I could easily get, and they were cheaply made and weren't all that reliable on the Amiga, but became more reliable when formatted as HD in an HD floppy drive)
This remains true for the A1200s sold by Escom, which used deliberately downgraded PC HD floppy drives. Still can't read/write HD, and can't easily modify these rare models downgraded drives to support HD.
The easiest and best way to read/write HD floppies is to either buy an external HD floppy drive, available for any Amiga though I believe you'll need Workbench 2.0 or later for it to work, or buy an A4000 or A4000T, the only models of Amiga with a native HD floppy drive.
Re: Copy That Floppy – Cambridge guide for preserving data from fragile floppy disks
#59A practical tip that works miracles on 5.25 diskettes: rub their edges against a table top or whatever, making them sit looser in their sleeves. Does miracles to disks that cause read errors - strange as it sounds.
Also, using an 80 track drive to read a 40 track disk works most of the time. But if you get any read errors, trying with a 40 track drive solves a lot of them!
Lastly, have multiple drives. A read error on one drive might not be a problem on another drive.
I recovered more than a thousand floppies some years ago. And learned that read errors in most cases are not irrecoverable. Try another drive, rub the diskette's edges - the two things that fixed most problems.
Re: Copy That Floppy – Cambridge guide for preserving data from fragile floppy disks
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whoa, wait, what? It can? I did not know that. Back in the day I had an A500, and only bought the 1200 decades later. Had no idea it would accept HD floppies. TIL. Thank you!
It can't. The GP is mistaken. The stock A1200 floppy drive cannot read/write HD disks, though you can format most HD disks as DD and physically use them as DD (depending on the brand of floppy disk; back in the late 1990s I used to buy HD floppies because they were the only ones I could easily get, and they were cheaply made and weren't all that reliable on the Amiga, but became more reliable when formatted as HD in…
Yes I must have mixed it up with A4000, I never had a 1200 so probably just assumed they were similar in that respect too, both being AGA and all.