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

https://www.digipres.org/the-floppy-guide/

by whiteblossom • 15 days ago

183 71 15 days ago

It's easy to forget that preserving digital data often comes down to keeping aging physical media alive. Nice practical guide.

jandrese2• 15 days ago

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.

ant6n• 15 days ago

Dropbox has been around for a while (cue that old hacker news comment)

mystifyingpoi• 15 days ago

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.

st_goliath• 15 days ago

The next hard drive was an order of magnitude larger than the old one, and so on.

Ah yes, the good old "old PC" folder that you would find on pretty much every Windows PC that used to have another "old PC" folder inside it somewhere, possibly inside an "external HDD (old)" folder :-)

Until the PC (or the HDD inside it) died surprisingly, people didn't have backups, or the backups turned out to be burned CDs that were scratched up and/or sat on a sun illuminated shelf for years.

I was at a class reunion a few years ago where it turned out, I was somehow the only one who still had (digital) photos from early-to-mid 2000s.

... 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.

Or the photos they upload gradually degrade in quality as the company repeatedly plays with re-compressing stuff to squeeze more space out.

People have observed old (10+ years) photos on Google Drive to start getting blurry, having weird artifacts, color banding, etc... IIRC there was an article posted on HN at one point with some particular egregious examples. Techmoan also mentioned this in a video some time ago, commenting that the same thing happened to old YouTube uploads of his from the 2000s.

amiga3862• 13 days ago

Unfortunately this sputtered out during the SSD transition

I advise people to backup their data (emails, writings, pictures, photos, home videos, phone contents, etc.) and worry about their music/TV/film/game collection later.

Most people's personal data collection doesn't run into dozens of terabytes, while most people's media collection does.

You can get portable 5TB HDDs, one or two of them is usually more than enough for most people's own files. Plug them in and backup regularly, e.g. monthly, they last a lot longer that way than if you backup once and throw them in the cupboard.

gnabgib• 15 days ago

Where'd you get the title from? It's just Copy That Floppy! (maybe +Imaging floppy disks for long-term preservation if it fits)

esafak• 15 days ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Copy_That_Floppy

jonathanoliver• 15 days ago

I came here just to post that link. I still have that song in my head when I hear the word "floppy".

demute• 15 days ago

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.

RetroTechie• 15 days ago

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.

officeplant• 14 days ago

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.

djmips• 15 days ago

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

tmountain• 15 days ago

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.

HPsquared• 15 days ago

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)

6LLvveMx2koXfwn• 15 days ago

. . . simultaneously over-writing the last remaining copy of the original Linux!

pdw• 15 days ago

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.)

yigalirani• 15 days ago

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

icevl• 15 days ago

Nice guide. I like the focus on preservation rather than just "getting the files off the disk".

SilverBirch• 15 days ago

Don't copy that floppy! - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up863eQKGUI

evandena• 14 days ago

I love watching old Computer Chronicals episodes and seeing that warning from the Software Publishers Association.

jimt1234• 14 days ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=140ea47ndME

girishso• 15 days ago

Any suggestions for copying files from the old CD or DVD?

Frieren• 15 days ago

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? ;)

wolvoleo2• 14 days ago

In that case it's usually not really needed to recover the floppy anyway. Copy protect means off the shelf software that you can probably still find on archive.org or anandonware sites.

felooboolooomba2• 15 days ago

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.

artisinal• 15 days ago

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.

mghackerlady• 14 days ago

Perhaps it's similar to the feeling of unwrapping a pack of CD-Rs

bartread4• 14 days ago

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.

LargoLasskhyfv• 14 days ago

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

But conceptually, haptically, optically...phenomenally!

actionfromafar2• 14 days ago

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

dghughes• 14 days ago

The jump from 1.44MB on a 3.5 floppy to a 650MB CD was astonishing.

wing-_-nuts• 14 days ago

Kids today will newer know the feeling of unwrapping a fresh package of 10 floppies.

Even as an elder millennial most of the floppies I used back then were formatted aol install disks. I don't recall ever buying floppies, but maybe my father did

ralphc• 14 days ago

The stickers that wrapped around the edge of the floppy and would never stay stuck...

Dwedit• 15 days ago

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.

hypercube33• 15 days ago

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

anjackson• 14 days ago

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

jchw• 14 days ago

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.

nosmokewhereiam• 14 days ago

"Don't copy that floppy" is deeply ingrained in my head rent-free!

varispeed• 14 days ago

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.

rasz• 14 days ago

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

zf00002• 14 days ago

I recall installing Slackware from floppy.

snarfy• 14 days ago

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

tclancy• 14 days ago

This is also an internal team name for the doctors in charge of preserving Elon Musk’s lineage.

AkBKukU2• 14 days ago

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

986aignan• 14 days ago

There's an issue on the FluxEngine git repo that may be related to this: https://github.com/davidgiven/fluxengine/issues/75

At the end of the thread, David Given reports that some PC floppy drives drop pulses when trying to read 800k Mac disks: https://github.com/davidgiven/fluxengine/issues/75#issuecomm...

So the Cambridge page might be saying "use an Applesauce controller" as a sort of shorthand for "use a drive from an actual Apple computer".

AkBKukU2• 14 days ago

I received a response stating something similar on the git repo. It is still incorrect to blame the controller, and I suggested instead to provide some compatible drive models to use instead like they already do in the more generic sections of the article. It should even be possible to to use the Mac drives with the Greaseweazle with an adapter because the 800k drives from the Apple computers are just Sony drives with an optional eject motor installed.

Unlike the Apple II they do not have a custom Apple PCB. It's possible Apple requested some tweaks when ordering from Sony but I don't think they are all that special. So it should be entirely possible to read the disks with other drives. Based on the information in the page you linked stating any 720k drive is compatible, I suspect the higher read rate may be a vestigial feature that Sony over spec'ed during the introduction and standardization of the 3.5in disk.

russdill• 14 days ago

The apple 2 5.25 drive does quarter track steps. I think this may be the issue.

Balooga• 14 days ago

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.

mikestew• 14 days ago

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

cortesoft• 14 days ago

A 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!

ozymandiax• 14 days ago

A 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.

samgranieri• 14 days ago

Heh. Copy that floppy. I remember being in the computer labs in high school in the mid to late 90s seeing posters saying "Don't copy that floppy" with strong anti-piracy warnings.

97-109-107• 14 days ago

What a nicely typeset and well organized page

llsf• 14 days ago

Oh memories of stacking those, and going to my friend's place to copy the latest games :) Remember how we were drilling holes to doubled the disk's storage capacity (from 720 to 1440) https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=47247

Before the floppy disks we were using cassettes... with our TO7 (circa 1983). It was slow by our current measure, but as kids we had time, I guess. The TO7 had even a lightpen to point at the CRC screen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomson_TO7

My parents attic has still some of my old floppy disks, and even maybe some cassettes.

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

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