What It Takes to Preserve Floppy Disks | Hacker News Reader

What It Takes to Preserve Floppy Disks

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93 pointspseudolus21 comments

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

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/

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.

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.

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.

Magnetic field cameras exist:

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

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

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?

Perhaps only a very early hard drive, as 15um is the resolution of those cameras but the latest hard drives have a track pitch around 100nm (0.1um); in any case, in the data recovery industry the usual solution is a spinstand:

https://www.guzik.com/products/head-and-media-disk-drive-tes...

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4262329

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.)

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.

CDs turned out to be terrible for long term storage, because the actual bits are pits in the very thin aluminum layer that's bonded to one side of the transparent polycarbonate disk. The back side of that aluminum often had nothing but a painted label to protect it.

DVD otoh, seems much more durable. The storage layer is sandwiched between two decent thicknesses of poly. But who knows, only time will tell.

So the article mentions that her favorite disk type is the 3 inch amstrad disk, so I google searched for that and clicked the first image that comes up and it's an article written by the person the first article is about.

https://digitalpreservation-blog.lib.cam.ac.uk/3-inch-treasu...

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.

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.

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

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

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