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?
Click to expand...


...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... :(
Click to expand...

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?
 
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