Data storage and old floppies, HD's, etc.

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Harrier said:
There are more photos, whcih I scanned so long ago they live on a floppy disk I have, but no computer with a floppy drive...
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...One of the reasons I've resolved to keep one spare system handy with a Teac Dual installed, so while I can't do direct A: - B: disk copies, I can at least read 3.5" and 5.25" floppies if the need ever arises. Still, if you can ever find the time/parts/resources, I think I speak for most of us that I'd love to see those images. Especially considering that we're finding out that the life expectancy of those old floppies is turning out to be nowhere near what was predicted, much less promised. And if the disks came from Elephant, they probably died sometime before 1995 anyway :mad: :mad:


Now, if I need to read an even older 8" floppy, God/Yahweh/Roddenberry knows where out in the garage that drive wound up 20 years after I retired the damned thing... :'( :'( :'(
 
I'm pretty sure that in my loft is an old floppy drive. And I also have a bunch of 3.5 floppy discs and some cases for them. Seven of those discs have Windows 3.1 on board! ;D
Any takers?
 
Nick said:
I'm pretty sure that in my loft is an old floppy drive. And I also have a bunch of 3.5 floppy discs and some cases for them. Seven of those discs have Windows 3.1 on board! ;D
Any takers?
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...Nah. My floppy set is boxed up in the garage, along with all of my OS/2 stuff - about 50 3.5" FDDs and several Warp CDs from my work on the beta team - and while I know they're sealed up in ziplocs, I also know the odds of me getting to them before "Stumpy" finally finishes me off are about as good as Zubrin getting a blank check. However, I do understand that there's an old retiree nearby who worked for IBM during the development of the original PCs who uses their old 10MB full-height hard drives for his boat anchors. Not sure if he's tried those old 5.25 FHFDDs yet, but I'll ask next time I bump into him :)
 
What is the shelf life of floppies? I know I've had one or two that I've struggled to read in the past plus I'm finding old CD/DVDs I've written are occasionally corrupting files already. Still have an old pc the kids play with that has a floppy drive in it.
 
3.5" floppies should have a pretty good shelf life if kept properly. The magnetic disk is suspended in midair, not in contact with any other surfaces (unlike 5.25" floppies and all forms of magnetic tape), so you only have to deal with the gradual breakdown of the magnetic regions.
That said, there were plenty of badly-produced floppies around which started to develop problems after only a few years of use.
I'm glad I started copying mine to other media as soon as they became available (ZIP disks for a while, then HD as capacity caught up). I still have most of my data going back to my first Mac, 20 years ago.
 
I still have stuff on floppies and ZIP discs, and that doesn't really bother me because I'm sure the data is still there. The Iomega 250 ZIP drive, I'm sure, would still function if I reconnected it to my new laptop. What I find much more of a pain is the old hard disks that can't get accessed following a crash, or a shock. Data might still be there but the drive is no longer recognized/accessible. I have over 600 Gb of music and movies on a hard disk that fell down, and although I thought it was just the external drive case that was damaged, it appears the problem lies with the disk itself... :(
 
Interesting theme, but I thought it to be better, to split it from the "UK Mock-Ups" thread.
About crashed harddrives: I was once able, to save data from a crashed HD by removing the
controller panel and replacing it with an identical one from a still working HD. Don't know anymore,
which type it was, but it was just removing a handful of screws and pulling a plug attached to a strip
conductor. But I was quite sure then, that the HD had no mechanical damage. ..
 
One should always listen HD drives on ones computer. If an extra noise starts to come copy everything away.

One of my old HD drives refused to work properly and one friend of mine gave me this voodoo trick:
Freeze it (one night in sub zero Celsius temperature)
Copy everything out of it (few files were corrupted, but most of it worked IIRC)
Throw it away
 
Stargazer2006 said:
I still have stuff on floppies and ZIP discs, and that doesn't really bother me because I'm sure the data is still there. The Iomega 250 ZIP drive, I'm sure, would still function if I reconnected it to my new laptop. What I find much more of a pain is the old hard disks that can't get accessed following a crash, or a shock. Data might still be there but the drive is no longer recognized/accessible. I have over 600 Gb of music and movies on a hard disk that fell down, and although I thought it was just the external drive case that was damaged, it appears the problem lies with the disk itself... :(
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I still have operational two USB and one SCSI(!) Zip 250 drives. Where I work does not allow the use of flash drives, so I use them to transfer files too large to email. I've fond th 100 MB disks have suffered virtually no deterioration, but they're very slow. teh 250s are muc faster, but I have seen that they have to be "refreshed" every so often or they start becoming unreadable. This applies even to disks that have never been used (I stashed some of those a few years ago).
 
Looking at the amount of collected data, I quite often had a look at streamer. They are still regarded
by professionals as the ultimate medium with regards to reliability. But they still have "professional" prices, too ... :-\
 
Yeah. 250 Mb ZIP disks were great. What do you mean by "refreshed"? Do you mean reformatted?
 
Grey Havoc said:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250516-the-people-stuck-using-ancient-windows-computers
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It's not just German transit, either. The trains in San Francisco's Muni Metro light railway, for example, won't start up in the morning until someone sticks a floppy disk into the computer that loads DOS software on the railway's Automatic Train Control System (ATCS). Last year, the San Francisco Municipal Transit Authority (SFMTA) announced its plans to retire this system over the coming decade, but today the floppy disks live on. (The SFMTA did not respond to a request for comment.)
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https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20251009-rescuing-knowledge-trapped-on-old-floppy-disks
From lectures by Stephen Hawking to the letters of British politician Neil Kinnock – it's a race against time to save the historical treasures locked away on old floppy disks.

Some of the world's most treasured documents can be found deep in the archives of Cambridge University Library. There are letters from Sir Isaac Newton, notebooks belonging to Charles Darwin, rare Islamic texts and the Nash Papyrus – fragments of a sheet from 200BC containing the Ten Commandments written in Hebrew.

These rare, and often unique, manuscripts are safely stored in climate-controlled environments while staff tenderly care for them to prevent the delicate pages from crumbling and ink from flaking away.

But when the library received 113 boxes of papers and mementoes from the office of physicist Stephen Hawking, it found itself with an unusual challenge. Tucked alongside the letters, photographs and thousands of pages relating to Hawking's work on theoretical physics, were items now not commonly seen in modern offices – floppy disks.

They were the result of Hawking's early adoption of the personal computer, which he was able to use despite having a form of motor neurone disease known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, thanks to modifications and software. Locked inside these disks could be all kinds of forgotten information or previously unknown insights into the scientists' life. The archivists' minds boggled.

These disks are now part of a project at Cambridge University Library to rescue hidden knowledge trapped on floppy disks. The Future Nostalgia project reflects a larger trend in the information flooding into archives and libraries around the world.

[snip]
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I had some old IOMEGA 250 (Or are they 100) ZIP-disks lying around but I haven't had a working ZIP-drive for over 20 years.
 
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Beyond their hyperbolic titles ("A digital dark age?"), the press always seems to present this as a tech issue. And why the mention of "not commonly seen in modern offices"? It isn't like the Cambridge University Library is incapable of sourcing remote drives for 3.5-, 5-, and 8-inch floppies.

Here's an alternative subject for journos ... how about an article reviewing the current state of the West's archives and libraries after 40 years of neglect?
 
It would appear that some belated and very important work is needed to be done to start transferring all of this data stored on various types of floppy-disks to more modern digital storage media.
 
NMaude said:
It would appear that some belated and very important work is needed to be done to start transferring all of this data stored on various types of floppy-disks to more modern digital storage media.
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Agreed. And then standards and policies established to ensure that storage transfer is an on-going process at major university libraries and state-funded archives and museums.
 
NMaude said:
How readily available are external zip-drives and are any of them compatible with Macs?
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Can find them on Ebay. Have like 3 or 4 for my Macs, they came with SCSI or USB 1 connections, or swappable VST Zip drives to be used on the olds Powerbook G3s.
Funny thing, some time ago I mounted one Zip on a MacBook Pro, and it showed a nice hires Zip icon. Wasn't the latest Mac OS of course (was Mac OSX 10.6 I think ?...). Wonder if the icon is still there in very recent systems. Until very recently Mac OS still had icons hidden in the system dating back to NextStep.
 
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I do some retro computing
my old Amstrad CPC 6128 needed only floppy drive belt replacement and cleanup
despite 40 years old it still read and write the Hitachi 3 inch disk no data lost
also use Gotek with SD card

For my C64 and C128 i had to rebuild a C1541-II from two dead drive to make working one
it still read most of 45 year old files on floppy
i use SD card reader for both

for moment i fight with two stubborn Apple disk II for Apple II+ from 1979
eider show "no system file" on Floppy or "Heximal number garbage"
i get also Gotek for Apple II+ as third drive

if you have old SCSI hardware, i recommend Blue SCSI, it replace the Hard drives with SD card.
Those work on Old Apple hardware after 1985 and some commodore Amiga.
and it reduce there operating Noise considerable

while commodore & Sinclair hardware need allot repair
is the Amstrad quite Robust need only little maintain
while the Apple II+ is build like Tank

NMaude said:
How readily available are external zip-drives and are any of them compatible with Macs?
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dam that is good question
i got old Zip drive but it got SCSI connector and no SCSI controller
The later External Zip drives had USB connector,
means that Mac /PC/ Linux could read them like USB device
but Iomega stop making Zip drive in 2005
 
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Readability of my hand written texts improved markedly when, at age 14, I switched from joined-up writing to block letters - upper and lower case. Ten years later I was asked to hand letter some tables.
The last time I was asked to write in cursive, was when a job recruitment bureau said they could not analyse my psyche from my block letter script. I obliged, but I hurt their feelings when I started laughing out loud on their request to draw a tree, for further analysis of my psyche.

I did not get the job. Probably for the best.
 
inkworm said:
What is the shelf life of floppies? I know I've had one or two that I've struggled to read in the past plus I'm finding old CD/DVDs I've written are occasionally corrupting files already. Still have an old pc the kids play with that has a floppy drive in it.
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Even burned DVDs/Blurays are iffy.
 

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