Copy That Floppy – Cambridge guide for preserving data from fragile floppy disks
digipres.org126 points by whiteblossom 12 hours ago
126 points by whiteblossom 12 hours 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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.)
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)
. . . simultaneously over-writing the last remaining copy of the original Linux!
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.
Dont most disks have write protection? Would that not be sufficient?
Unfortunately, some USB floppy drives ignore the read-write tab. It's not enforced at the hardware level.
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.
It's easy to forget that preserving digital data often comes down to keeping aging physical media alive. Nice practical guide.
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.
> 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.
Hehe, I used to create a folder as some variant of "Old" and move everything in my downloads folder into it once or twice a year, and with a lesser frequency my documents. At one point when I realised this had got about 10 levels deep, I switched to yyyy-mm format directories instead of nesting them.
I also used to back up other PCs to each other somewhat regularly, and sometimes I'd end up with those files back on the original PC in a backup of another. Fortunately, when I switched to borgbackup on Windows as well [1], this massive reduplication of files became a solved problem.
[1] borgbackup doesn't officially work on Windows, but I run it in WSL which does reasonably well for all the files I really care about (i.e. the stuff I've made). When they have particular unusual characters in the filenames, it throws up a warning for that file every time, but otherwise seems fine. I've never bothered investigating whether those particular files restore to the correct filename, because I know I've also backed up the zip file those files have come from and it's just accidental that I've backed up the extracted files as well.
I still have a bunch of these called "FromOld".
Same! It's in Dropbox now. I found the source from the very first code I got paid to write, back in 1998. I was 14, and mostly self-taught. One of these days I'm going to run it through static analysis and see how many security holes there were.
> 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.
I lost the only recordings of my band when Myspace Music died.
At one point, I also had files on RapidShare. They probably weren't of any value, but I have no idea what they were now.
In case you hadn't heard, there's a sizable archive here https://archive.org/details/myspace_dragon_hoard_2010
and I see another collection mentioned on: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19569865
What happened to the original files that you uploaded to Myspace?
Why wouldn't you have made any attempt to preserve any of copy of your data anyway? Even if you believed the files would stay online forever, it's surely always more convenient to use local files than re-download every time?
(but also sorry you lost your last physical copy of your memories, that kind of sucks and sorry if my comment comes across as quite insensitive)
I recall installing Slackware from floppy.
The file on the floppy the scripts looked for to know it was on the last disk of the set
"Don't copy that floppy" is deeply ingrained in my head rent-free!
> 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? ;)
Where'd you get the title from? It's just Copy That Floppy! (maybe +Imaging floppy disks for long-term preservation if it fits)
I came here just to post that link. I still have that song in my head when I hear the word "floppy".
Nice guide. I like the focus on preservation rather than just "getting the files off the disk".
This is also an internal team name for the doctors in charge of preserving Elon Musk’s lineage.
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
Any suggestions for copying files from the old CD or DVD?
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.
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
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.
>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.
> 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.