What It Takes to Preserve Floppy Disks

(spectrum.ieee.org)

82 points

by pseudolus2 days ago |

18 comments

by sowbug1 hours ago|

[-]

All my childhood Apple II 5 1/4" floppies have been mirrored, so I can visit those files in an emulator any time I want. But I'll miss the crazy amount of control the system had over the physical disk drive. Nibble counting, half tracks, quarter tracks, spiral tracks, tracks 35+, weak bits... it was like an adventure game built directly into the machine.

by kev00912 hours ago|

prev|

[-]

The internally linked article is much better than this https://www.digipres.org/the-floppy-guide/

by walrus0111 hours ago|

parent|

[-]

The part about head cleaning says "high purity" isopropyl alcohol and then says 70-99%. There's little reason to buy anything other than 99%. Additionally some of the same cleaning swabs and wipes sold for fiber optic patch cable and bulkhead connector cleaning are well suited for this.

These are low cost generic/bulk items you can buy from chinese sellers via Amazon or other sources. If it's good enough to clean 9/125 singlemode fiber it should be good enough for floppy drive heads. Ignore the reel-type cleaners that look like a mini betamax tape, and the push click cleaners, which can only be used on real fiber stuff. Go for the swabs and kimtech wipes.

visual examples of what the products look like:

https://focenter.com/products/fiber-optic-cleaning/productio...

https://www.occfiber.com/product/kimtech-lint-free-wipes/

by cryo329 hours ago|

parent|

[-]

You should actually dilute it to about 70% with distilled water. It helps penetrate cell membranes and destroy them. You'd be surprised how much fungus and other nasty stuff appears over and inside old tech. I deal with camera lenses myself.

But yeah just buy the 99% stuff and some distilled water and do it yourself. You can wash down with distilled water too so having a few litres lying around is quite handy.

by myself2481 hours ago|

prev|

[-]

Cyclomethicone is getting hard to get depending on your jurisdiction. I think it's shelf-stable though, so if you think this might be something you want to do in the future, maybe get some now.

(But also, the disks aren't getting any younger. Do it now.)

by londons_explore11 hours ago|

prev|

[-]

I would like to see approaches to recovering data from fragile disks by placing the inner disk on a flat surface and using some kind of imaging technology to measure the magnetic fields - perhaps an electron microscope could do the job at low enough field strengths?

Using this I imagine it might be possible to not only read the disk data, but perhaps even previous versions of data that has been overwritten.

by userbinator11 hours ago|

parent|

[-]

Magnetic field cameras exist:

https://matesy.de/en/products/cmos-magview

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Visualization_of_magnetic...

by rkagerer3 hours ago|

parent|

[-]

Could you use them on a hard disk platter? Is there software out there for recovery of data from a set of platters taken from a bad HDD for which replacement heads / doner drives are not longer available?

by aaron69511 hours ago|

parent|

prev|

[-]

[dead]

by l0new0lf-G9 hours ago|

prev|

[-]

Mostly everyone over 40, and even some younger ones, still have some old floppy disks with files that may or may not be of value.

Somewhere in my mother's house, there still is (hopefully) a floppy disk from 2006-2007 with my teenage self's diary. I wish it is preserved

by Sarkie6 hours ago|

parent|

[-]

I had my Tools disk and my MSDOS gaming boot disk, tweaked and tuned to perfection.

Those were the best of times.

Little me didn't know that was the gateway drug to coding.

by Forgeties797 hours ago|

parent|

prev|

[-]

Surprised you were still using a floppy disk in 2006-2007! You have decent odds, that’s pretty young for one.

by l0new0lf-G6 hours ago|

parent|

[-]

Not sure why my parents chose to put a floppy disk driver on a desktop computer bought in 2006 (perhaps some seller was very convincing?), but I thought it was cool, so I used it sometimes. It was also cheaper than USB-sticks -and less likely to lose

by bombcar3 hours ago|

parent|

[-]

2006 is close enough to 1998 that floppies would still be around in business settings, or for other specialized devices like embroidery machines.

I think I stopped adding floppies around that time.

by twooclock8 hours ago|

prev|

[-]

When I moved out from my parents I took a box with aprox 100 floppies. I was pleasently surprised when only 2 were unreadeable all others were ok. The other box with CDs had a much higher "fault rate". Go figure.

by charcircuit7 hours ago|

prev|

[-]

What it actually takes is taking the floppy disc out, cleaning any mold on it, putting it back in the case, and then using greaseweazle to image the magnetic flux of the disc.

by shevy-java9 hours ago|

prev|

[-]

Preserving old original floppy disks may be useful, for several reasons, but I myself got rid of all my floppy disks many years ago when USB sticks became viable; even ages ago already, e. g. using CDs and DVDs getting rid of floppy disks - so actually those USB devices killed my use case for floppy disks, CDs and DVDs. I still like DVDs but having USB sticks is simply more convenient in the long run.

by userbinator8 hours ago|

parent|

[-]

The longevity of NAND flash is still very questionable, particularly modern high-density TLC/QLC:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43739028

SLC and early MLC should be OK for at least a few decades if not very worn, however

by Joel_Mckay9 hours ago|

parent|

prev|

[-]

Indeed, some create master disk images with forensic tools, and physical drives:

https://github.com/keirf/greaseweazle

Then use clean disk images on USB floppy emulators for old equipment:

https://github.com/keirf/flashfloppy

It is rare to need these tools, but for some folks it is important. =3

by haeseong11 hours ago|

prev|

[-]

[flagged]