The people rescuing forgotten knowledge trapped on old floppy disks
bbc.com
bbc.com
I'm not sure what else was there that they'll find interesting. Maybe they'll let me know.
I worked in a Mac lab briefly in college and we ran Disinfectant from time to time on the lab machines. Sometimes we would find Mac viruses infecting a file or two and I collected a few of these on a floppy. The archivist seemed delighted to have a few disks with "contained" Mac viruses as well.
When I used floppy disks routinely, their lifespan was a matter of months if they were used regularly. For stuff I was working on daily, I would always save it twice to separate disks. I'd be fortunate to get through a school term without having disk errors, so I learned pretty quickly the value of having multiple copies.
For stuff that was just archives, saved and then rarely accessed, they would survive longer. My guess is just that the read/write heads were fairly abrasive and wore down the magnetic layer of the disks pretty quickly under heavy use.
Your experience is very different from mine. I used floppies with favorite games and such on them for at least 3 years pretty regularly when I was in high school/early uni in the mid 80's. And I can't remember EVER actually having disk errors in school with homework and such on them. Possibly I did, but I'd think losing that critical piece of homework would have stuck with me.
The lore is that the world was moving to 3.5 and Alan Sugar (who owned Spectrum brand later after Amstrad bought them out) got a huge job lot of drives and disks cheap so they used them for the +3 as well as the existing CPC systems that had them (in fact the +3 used a modified version of AMDOS which ran the drives on the CPC).
It wasn't a terrible spectrum but it was already very obsolete by the time it was released.
It had a much better BASIC, and CP/M was also available (CP/M Plus).
Between the Amstrad PC1512 at the school club, the other friends lucky enough to have Amiga 500 which organized demoscene like parties at their places, until I finally got hold of a 386SX.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39495973 - February 2024 (23 comments)
https://wiki.techtangents.net/wiki/Floppy_Disk_Imaging
and my little contribution if you have a $5 logic analyzer board (FX2LP) and want to play in Sigrok/PulseView/DSView https://github.com/raszpl/sigrok-mfm
printable-binary: A way to visualize/serialize raw binary data into a string form that doesn't break terminals (converts to/from specially-selected utf8 glyphs that stay monospaced in most fonts) which has some unique features: https://github.com/pmarreck/printable-binary
bitrot_guard (yeah, apparently I can't decide whether to use hyphens or underscores in names yet, lol): A way to restore a user-configurable percent of data degradation in a file or set of files... without touching the original files. Only dependency is par2: https://github.com/pmarreck/bitrot_guard
Both should work on macOS/Linux/WSL.
Go the Python route and hyphenate the name but use underscores in the import, for maximum confusion and searchability disruption.
Can't find it now so not sure if it is still up, but I can't imagine they ended up with enough equipment that they will never need more. Must be something all archives struggle with and there will always be some format they do not already have equipment for, or some machine they need spare parts for?
There was a great talk by Jason Scott (textiles) on how he dug out Jordan Mechners original prince of persia source code from the sands of time.
I see what you did there
Mine as well, but luckily many years ago I copied all the contents of my old floppies to CD-ROMs, and then later all the CD-ROMs to DVDs, and finally to USB-harddisks, and now all the files live happily (hopefully forever) in my hoard ZFS (and several off-site backups).
The only significant exception is most 1.2 MB floppies. Those were also 5.25", but the drives were much more difficult to calibrate well. Can't get the files from almost any of those. A few I can list the filenames, but not access the file contents. Most are just unreadable. I could not even find a drive that worked well enough to copy those using my KryoFlux.
(* Not that there is anything at all of real value on all those old floppies. This is pure nostalgia/hoarding.)
We really need something that could store data for 80 years minimum. Which is really just a life time of a person. Stored well and right paper could out last all of our digital alternatives. The M-DISC is expensive per GB, and I think they went bankrupt in 2020, and BlueRay disc is too small in capacity.
At this rate of things we may never own anything physical again.
The issue is that anything you made like that would need to be forward readable because storage capacity demands only ever increase over time.
i.e. imagine a 1.44MB 80 year floppy disk from 1985, while it'd last til 2065 no one would use it in 2025 because you'd need about a thousand of them to hold a modern 4K video
Though the same applies to polycarbonate/acrylic-glue BD-R.
If you do that they'll keep for centuries, at least the tapes that use oxygen resistant magnetic particles like BaFe (not MP).
Calcium oxide aka burnt lime is a cheap non-toxic (but caustic!) desiccant that can keep an e.g. paint can dry for centuries.
I find it entertaining that high speed magnetic tape - a technology in the consumer space that is basically obsolete is still one of the optimal solutions for "I have hundreds of terabytes of data I need to be able to read in 15 years".
Minidisc. I have discs that are 30+ years old that have been abused their entire life and still work fine with no noticeable degradation. I specifically choose this format to archive audio because the disc housing works great for environmental protection and I’d eventually like to give my music collection to my children/grand children. The discs can also store data. My minidisc player shows up as removable storage device when I plug it into my computer so I can throw anywhere from about 140mb-1Gb(hi-MD) per disk.
Officially they’re rated to about 50 years, but if you sealed them and stored them properly then they could easily make it past 80 years.
An enterprising individual could probably clone an old device and flash a stock firmware to it if they really wanted to. The functionality that goes first in older devices is usually the write head, but you’d probably still be able to read discs for decades if you took care of the device and stored it well.
The minidisc community online is also very active and people are active working to reverse engineer virtually every aspect of the players and disc writing software, and some people even produce new drop-in replacement parts for the components that tend to fail like OLED displays, etc.
Anecdotally, the stuff my grandpa filmed on Super-8 is still in nearly perfect condition 65 years later. But most of his 16mm stuff from just a few years earlier than that has vinegar syndrome, so it's not "just film it and you're good"
If the film is rare, highly flammable, and was made before 1951, there's a good chance it'll end up on George Willeman's desk. Or more specifically, in one of his vaults. As the Nitrate Film Vault Manager at The Library of Congress' Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation, Willeman presides over more than 160,000 reels of combustible cinematic treasure, from the original camera negatives of 1903's The Great Train Robbery to the early holdings of big studios like Columbia, Warner Bros, and Universal. And more barrels keep showing up every week.
https://www.wired.com/2015/07/film-preservation/
Archive link: https://archive.ph/zluV8
Mylar if stored properly could last a very very long time.
We have that. We know how to put digital data onto paper, at high density. Not high compared to actual drives or even optic disks of course, but still enough that we could put all importan data that a person produces throughout a lifetime into a large box of A4 sheets, which would still be legible after many decades. All that's needed is an agreement on a clever collection of formats for text and images, maybe even video, formats that are well documented (ideally the documentation is stored alongside the data).
The problem is not that we don't have the tech to do such things, the problem is
a) In our current world, the only things that seem to get huge amounts of resources are those that make some shareholders happy
b) Most of the data humanity produces these days, is useless noise, and the only reason anyone collects it, is to make a quick buck. And generative AI has made this trend a lot worse.
Good heavens this makes me feel ancient. Do today's BBC readers really not know that there were two main sizes of floppy disk?
8"
5 1/4"
3 1/2"
and a couple less standard ones, then you get into sectoring (hard, soft), sidedness and density, plus disk formats on top of that
For example, I can mount the FAT images I have for MS-DOS 35 years ago, but not these.
Secondly, however, the idea that people, after my death, would spend hours and hours on end going through all of my computers to see what is on there, seems like a nightmare at some level.
5¼ floppy → 3.5" floppy → Zip/Jazz Disks → CD/DVD Discs → Hard Drives → Cloud Storage → Self-Hosted RAID
https://digitalpreservation-blog.lib.cam.ac.uk/knitting-thro...