Copy That Floppy: A Cambridge Guide to Preserving Data from Fragile Disks
Copy That Floppy – Cambridge guide for preserving data from fragile floppy disks
I created this guide to help practitioners image 8-inch, 5.25-inch, 3.5-inch, and 3-inch floppy disks for long-term preservation. Drawing on expert interviews and workshops from the Future Nostalgia project, I outline how to identify carriers, acquire compatible hardware, and clean damaged media. My focus is on creating accurate disk images rather than just extracting files, ensuring these fragile digital artifacts survive for future generations.
Regional differences will be present and will affect the hardware and possible software needed to image and analyse disks.
- 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.
- felooboolooomba
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 formatting, the wast free space, ... as much as retail therapy is a thing, I think that was floppy therapy.
- tmountain
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 on them as a storage medium for anything important without regular backups.
- Dwedit
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.
- SilverBirch
Don't copy that floppy! - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up863eQKGUI