

Floppy Disks: It’s Too Late - aw3c2
http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3191

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RyanMcGreal
Some years ago, I went through a tedious process of moving all the data I had
on my mid-80s Compaq Deskpro Portable to a slightly-less-antique IBM AT, using
5.25 inch floppies. Then I migrated the data from my AT to a still-newer PC
using 3.5 inch floppies. From there it was a simple matter of burning the data
onto a CD to migrate to my then-current PC - which, in turn, I backed up and
copied over to my now-current PC when I replaced it.

The upshot is that I still have all the files I created a quarter of a century
ago.

~~~
SwellJoe
I did the same with my Amigas about 5 years ago, which was more complicated
than your process (I had to make a cable and buy a USB-to-RS232 adapter since
modern PCs don't have serial ports). A few of the floppies were unreadable,
particularly the ones where I'd used one of the non-standard formats that
packed more data onto the disk and performed faster, but I was mostly able to
pull everything off, and the hard disks were fine. I have a directory on my
Linux box of the old Amiga stuff, and can play the mods I wrote, and poke
around at some of the stuff I wrote, including the first book I ever wrote
(which was an interactive Jazz improvisation course in AmigaText), and such.

Honestly, though, other than the music, I didn't find much worth keeping.
Pirated games, 8-bit porn, etc. Though, it did remind me of the name of my
favorite old synthesis tool (RGS), so I was able to look it up and do some
research on modern alternatives...which it turns out there aren't really any,
unfortunately. I'd carried on a conversation with the developer when he
announced no further development, and wish I still had the notes, as he'd
included quite a bit of technical details about the way it works (though it's
mostly obvious now that I'm more knowledgeable; FFT over time for the
generation of images, adding sine waves for the other direction). But, I've
never gotten around to trying to reproduce it.

Interestingly, those ancient machines (a 2000 and 3000, both with hard disk
controllers and hard disks; an AD516 sound card; and some other formerly very
expensive hardware), and a pile of random Amiga junk and magazines, sold for
$300. Given that PC stuff from that era would bring nothing, I'd say the
resale value of Amigas has held up shockingly well. Collector value, I
suppose. Even weirder, I guess, I bought a Commodore 64 after getting rid of
the Amigas.

~~~
mortenjorck
I have probably hundreds of DeluxePaint animations from the mid-90s
distributed across a handful of floppy disks and a couple of A1200 hard drives
(from when I wanted to be a video game artist, of course!). I've wondered
before how I might ever go about recovering them, if indeed they are
recoverable. Any instructions you'd recommend?

~~~
ig1
For floppy disks:

<http://www.amigaforever.com/kb/13-118>

Unfortunately a lot of the solutions for Amiga <-> PC conversion no longer
work on modern PCs (i.e requiring old versions of windows, isa slots, etc).

The hard drive is easy, you can just plug it into your PC and mount it under
linux (using the affs filesystem). If your a windows users I think WinUAE
might be able to mount it but I don't know.

~~~
SwellJoe
Hard drives on the Amiga were usually SCSI. Specifically, the very old SCSI
interface, which has never been widely available in PCI cards.

This was my problem with the "just plug it into your PC" process. So, I ended
up needing to connect the machines via serial and transferring the the Amiga
Forever tool.

But, I guess if you had IDE disks, that'd be easier...though the old IDE
standard plugs are also dinosaurs at this point. Not as hard to find as old
school SCSI, but still not certain to be available. I happened to have a vast
hardware closet from running a hardware business for several years...but even
that was insufficient.

~~~
eftpotrm
Well....

A600, A1200 and A4000 all had internal IDE interfaces. The A3000 had a SCSI
interface. All other Amiga models had to use add-on HDD interfaces, which
started SCSI because that was the dominant platform and shifted more to IDE
over time.

So, I'm not sure I'd agree that SCSI was more popular on Amigas over time.

------
ChuckMcM
As someone who periodically goes through their archives and moves them to
newer media, I found it amusing that my college archives (which were
originally on a 1600BPI mag tape) fit on a zip disk, then over the next 5
years everything fit on a CD, then a DVD, then a dual layer DVD, then a BluRay
disk.

We used to joke that you could send a uuencoded and encrypted RAR archive out
to alt.binaries and then you would be able to recover your data forever. Weird
how prophetic that seems to me now.

There are places like NASA who have called on the Computer History Museum for
help in getting data off 7-bit magnetic tape.

And as others have pointed out if you save the data but can't read it because
the application is toast (Deluxe Paint files anyone?) you have bigger issues.
Then you find yourself with an emulator so that you can boot CP/M so you can
run Peachtree Accounting so you can read the data from your first lemonade
stand.

Its a very deep rabbit hole archiving all that stuff.

------
ig1
If you had a Commodore Amiga I'd recommend you have a look at the following
list of Amiga games incase you have one that hasn't yet been saved for
history:

<http://www.softpres.org/wanted>

------
jamesbkel
Back in High School I wanted to get a bit of IS experience, so I volunteered
in the IS dept of a nearby hospital. Turned out, my job was to format all
10-20K of the old Windows95 installation floppies they had sitting around
(this was 2000-2001).

At first I almost just left. But the guys in the IS dept were actually really
nice and let me use the spare parts they had just sitting around. I ended up
making a setup with 3 screens, 3 towers and each tower with 4 floppy drives.
Plus an extra tower & screen to browse the internet while I would swap disks
in and out of the other three.

My hidden back corner behind all the ancient, noisy tape drive towers (it was
a Hospital... need to be HIPPA compliant and anal about recouds) became the
cool place to hang out and I ended up learning a mountain of information from
those guys/gals.

~~~
mirkules
Hopefully, they weren't low density floppies that they made you punch holes in
and reformat as high density.

~~~
yuhong
They weren't, because they were Windows 95 installation floppies.

~~~
mirkules
I had a CD-ROM by then, so I don't know what the floppy installs looked like.

~~~
yuhong
But you know that Windows 95 was released in _1995_.

~~~
mirkules
So what is your point? I used low density disks in '94, so it's not a stretch
to imagine they were around in '95.

------
dlsspy
When we released memcached 1.4.0, we gave out the source on floppy disks at
OSCON. The majority didn't get it. "I don't even have anything that can read
this" was a common response. It was surreal how many people thought we were
serious about using floppy disks as a medium for distributing software in the
late 2,000s.

I still have a box of these on my desk.

~~~
robtoo
So... why _did_ you distribute the source on floppies?

I could understand it if you had a digital archiving point to make, but
memcached? I really don't see it.

~~~
jamesgeck0
Maybe to emphasize how small memcached is?

~~~
zokier
I wouldn't consider 1.44 bzip2ed source very small though.

------
js2
But Elephant Memory Systems NEVER FORGETS -<http://imgur.com/a/jtlhW> :-)

Images from <http://home.comcast.net/~kevin_d_clark/ems/>

~~~
SimHacker
I just found one of those bright yellow Elephant Memory Systems t-shirts on
eBay and ordered it, to replace the one I had years ago. At least I never
forgot!

------
wccrawford
I don't know why he doesn't just say it directly, but all media has an
expiration date. It was only intended to last so long (because any longer was
too expensive) and floppies are not all past their expiration dates.

This is a good reminder that 'backups' doesn't mean 'put it on a disk and
forget it'. You have to maintain them.

~~~
textfiles
The point of the post wasn't to talk about the general aspects of media, but
to specifically and directly make a call to action for a subset of all media
that I and a team of volunteers can rescue data from.

------
lisper
A related story:

<http://rondam.blogspot.com/2008/06/bugged-life.html>

------
jevinskie
So how should I try to recover data from my floppies without sending them to
this polite gentleman? Do 5 dd images and do a bit-for-bit comparison? I would
imagine that there are already utilities out there to do this (though probably
with a focus on hard drives). It will also be interesting to find file formats
that have long since died and require the original software running in a VM to
read.

This reminds me, I need to ping the pbForth [0] author to see if he has an old
version of his software. I would like to see the first code that I ever wrote
- a line following Mindstorms robot programmed during a summer computer camp!
That camp was a large part of why I'm getting my PhD in CompE today.

[0]: <http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Lego/pbforth.html>

~~~
kronusaturn
I suggest ddrescue.

<http://www.gnu.org/s/ddrescue/ddrescue.html>

------
ugh
Luckily that’s mostly no more a problem if your data is already on modern
storage media. HDDs are cheap, making backups is easy and slowly but surly
that notion that backups are necessary is entering the collective
consciousness.

Data now just moves from HDD to HDD and is usually (or should at least be) on
at least two HDDs (or one HDD and one SSD) at once, one of which is replaced
as it breaks.

I’m not terribly worried about the expiration date of HDDs, it doesn’t really
matter that they are only the temporary home of your data for a few years.

One interesting problem where the short lifetime of HDDs comes into play is
how you should pass something on, for example to your kids or grandkids. It’s
not their data, they probably don’t care enough (or don’t pay enough
attention) to make sure to always migrate it to current storage media. Sure,
they might enjoy looking at old photos and videos but how often will they do
that? Every five years? Every decade?

Just stowing away a HDD in the attic is probably not a great idea. Using
contemporary storage media that might survive longer is also questionable.
Will it be easily possible to read CDs and DVDs in forty years?

I’m actually more worried about that than about file formats. I’m willing to
bet that it will be possible to open up JPEGs with PCs (whatever they may be)
in forty years. Even by default, even without getting any extra software. TIF
is now 25 years old, it was never really widely used (at least compared to
JPEG) but it’s still easy to open up TIF files. (Forget opening the raw files
from your DSLR, though.)

~~~
to3m
Regarding passing stuff on, I imagine it will go like this, just as it always
has done:

1\. Leave important data to children in your will.

2\. Die.

3\. For you, there is no step 3 :)

In the long run, if your data is valuable to your descendants, they will be
sure to take good care of it.

On the other hand, if your data is valuable only to you, consider what just
happened in step 2...

------
tibbon
I've got a box packed up here that I'm shipping to Jason rather soon of C64
games and late 80's and early 90's video game manuals.

I'm keeping my copy of Zork for the C64 (not like he needs another copy of it
to backup), but the rest I'll send to him.

~~~
th0ma5
I hate to say it, but I found some OCD-inspired complete torrents of C64
stuff, had a good portion of the various pirate groups releases of each thing,
including their awesome intro demo graphics.

~~~
textfiles
Yes, and I've got many of those, but they are, by their nature, the commercial
products, not the individual bufferings of user groups, BBSes that lasted a
short time, and so on.

~~~
th0ma5
oh hello jason!!! you also don't get thanked enough for your historical
preservation efforts, so thank you, thank you, thank you!!

------
ddw
What's about CD-Rs? 10 years? I know it depends on the quality of the disc.

In college a photography professor once mentioned that he used gold plated CD-
Rs or something like that because they would last longer.

~~~
chaosmachine
A few months ago, I went to dig up some of my early music-making efforts
(burned to CD-R in 1999), only to find out they were unreadable. It turns out
at least 10% of my "old CD pile" is already dead or damaged. The ones with
stick-on labels are especially difficult to read.

~~~
zokier
That's way before cheap bulk CD-Rs and fast (and equally cheap) 16x burners
appeared though.

------
aninteger
What happens to the data that is archived? Are they available to download?

I see a <http://cd.textfiles.com> but no floppies.textfiles.com

------
daimyoyo
This presents a unique opportunity. So current storage tech lasts about 10
years or so, give or take. I think there will be a massive migration of data
and if you can prove your media lasts say 50 years, people will be quite
excited to embrace your standard. As an aside, I have a massive Commodore 5
1/4" disk drive reader at my parents house. Found it in a goodwill. Thing
weighs like 15lbs. Anyone know of drivers I can download to make it work on a
modern PC?

~~~
NateLawson
ZoomFloppy: USB -> Commodore 1541/1571/1581 drive adapter

<http://store.go4retro.com/products/ZoomFloppy.html>

I designed it. Board and all software is open-source.

------
powertower
Don't forget about the Iomega Zip Drive.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_drive>

~~~
Malic
Zip drive? Luxury. Oh what I had to go through to pull a few QuarkXpress
documents off of a SyQuest drive for my brother! "SCUD: The Whole Shebang"
wouldn't have been complete without it!

Had to dig up an old Performa-era Mac that had the SCSI-1 (non-Centronics
style) connector that the SyQuest drive had. The drive was borrowed in friend-
of-a-friend style. And then... how to get the files off of that Mac!?
Ethernet/AppleTalk issues on an 80's Mac in a 21st-century networking
environment wasn't trivial.

I don't think I could remember how to do it again if I had to.

------
brianb722
I actually got rid of a bunch of 3.5" floppies I had in the back room of my
house this weekend. Despite feeling pretty silly about it, I still took the
time to make sure to actually tear them up rather than just dump them in the
trash. Who knows what 1.44MB of data could do from my 1997 MS Money file.

------
dennisgorelik
Importance of old files is overrated. Old files have some value, but not too
much.

It's important to forget old stuff to free our attention for new things that
are often more valuable.

------
slipperyp
Cool - I saw that DISKDRV car driving around Seattle last Saturday, I think.
In fact, it wasn't far from the Ikea where picture was probably taken.

------
powertower
It would be easier to register floppydump.org and have users upload their disk
contents in a zip.

~~~
pavel_lishin
I think the point is that users no longer have the capability to extract data
from a floppy, even if that data is easily readable. I certainly don't have a
3.5 drive, much less a 5.25, and who knows if the floppies at my parents'
house are still readable.

~~~
camiller
I have an old 8" floppy disk with some of my old IBM Series/1 code on it.
Needless to say it is staying on it.

------
antidaily
Get them on a Jaz cartridge. Quickly.

~~~
fishercs
ditto or die.

~~~
moe
SyQuest!

Now get off my lawn.

~~~
Apocryphon
I got two words for you, sugar... Zip disk.

~~~
Apocryphon
I guess people 'round here don't enjoy _Zoolander_. A shame.

~~~
endgame
IMHO: It's more that "people 'round here" don't care for comments that are
little more than references.

