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

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• 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.

  by demute
• >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.

  by officeplant
• > 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.

  In the case of personal files: probably true. Who needs 20y old tax filings.

  But there are exceptions. For example: sometimes games were released (binary only), decades later an author dies, relatives clean out the attic & flog some old computer junk on eBay, buyer goes through the stuff & discovers source code for a game that was believed to be lost long ago.

  Or a never-released book manuscript is discovered in similar fashion.

  It's not often, but it does happen.

  by RetroTechie
• Last time that I had to use flopping disc was when the Chicago movie came out that was 2002. 24 years ago. And even that was for one off project after several years of not using it
  by yigalirani
• I 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.
  by varispeed
• Any suggestions for copying files from the old CD or DVD?
  by girishso
• If 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
  by rasz
• This is also an internal team name for the doctors in charge of preserving Elon Musk’s lineage.
  by tclancy
• Nice guide. I like the focus on preservation rather than just "getting the files off the disk".
  by icevl
• Where'd you get the title from? It's just Copy That Floppy! (maybe +Imaging floppy disks for long-term preservation if it fits)
  by gnabgib
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Copy_That_Floppy
  by esafak
• > Not all red or unreadable sectors necessarily indicate failure. Many copy-protected disks include intentionally malformed sectors that cannot be read by standard logic.

  How they know? ;)

  by Frieren
• "Don't copy that floppy" is deeply ingrained in my head rent-free!
  by nosmokewhereiam
• I recall installing Slackware from floppy.
  by zf00002
• The file on the floppy the scripts looked for to know it was on the last disk of the set

  https://irrlua.sourceforge.net/install.end

  by snarfy
• It's easy to forget that preserving digital data often comes down to keeping aging physical media alive. Nice practical guide.
  by mune2gu-chan
• 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 eventually be wiped when the accounts stop being paid or lost when the company goes under.
  by jandrese
• I can't afford an the recommended Applesauce for Apple II disk preservation so I'm hoping that the Adafruit work which added Apple II drive support will work for me.

  https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_Floppy

  by djmips
• Don't copy that floppy! - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up863eQKGUI
  by SilverBirch
• I love watching old Computer Chronicals episodes and seeing that warning from the Software Publishers Association.
  by evandena
• 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.
  by Dwedit
• Dont most disks have write protection? Would that not be sufficient?
  by hypercube33
• 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.
  by tmountain
• . . . simultaneously over-writing the last remaining copy of the original Linux!
  by 6LLvveMx2koXfwn
• I wonder if anyone made an error correcting driver or file format for unreliable data storage like this. Did anyone ever implement RAId (redundant array of independent diskettes)? Edit: apparently RAR had an option to add internal error correction data to the archive, and you can also use PAR2 files for another layer (I think that's able to reconstruct the archive if one file is totally unreadable)
  by HPsquared
• Floppy reliability dropped of a cliff in the mid-90s. It came to a point where it wasn't unusual to see I/O errors even on completely new floppies.

  But with older drives and older media, produced to a higher standard, they were pretty reliable. (After all, IBM invented them to store CPU microcode, they had to be.)

  by pdw
• 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.

  by felooboolooomba
• > the feeling of unwrapping a fresh package of 10 floppies

  For us floppies just appeared in the home! I think my dad took them from the office so he could work from home.

  by artisinal
• Perhaps it's similar to the feeling of unwrapping a pack of CD-Rs
  by mghackerlady
• 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.

  by bartread