3,000 floppy disk archive (1982–1994)

I fished out my USB 3 1/2" floppy drive... it still works. I've also got a box of old floppies. Guess I know what I'm doing this weekend!

I have a pretty large collection of Commodore floppies and possibly even cassettes as well as floppies with early PC stuff. The only method I know of to get data off the Commodore stuff is with an expensive analog reader only made by one or two niche places. Are there any other options?

edit: I guess to answer my own question, I just found out about ZoomFloppy. This thing seems pretty cheap and works specifically for Commodore disks. The other devices I was looking at were for any analog floppy interface... http://www.go4retro.com/products/zoomfloppy/

I beg to disagree. A year ago, I fished out my collection of 5 1/4" disks and transferred them to a hard drive. Most of them read okay.

On the 3 1/2" front a couple of months ago, I fished out my boxes of 3.5" floppy disks and transferred them to a hard drive, then overwrote them with zeros, effectively doing an exhaustive surface test. Only a small number (single digits) were unreadable, and less than 10% would have had any read errors. Of the 90% that read error free, they all wrote error free.

Going free: 230 x 1.44MB 3 1/2" floppy disks, all recently verified for no bad sectors. Pickup from Sydney, AU. I can also throw in a few 100MB zip disks.

Better not tell my 8" disks.

people: http://studioforcreativeinquiry.org/events/warhol-discovery

interface: http://www.kryoflux.com/

software: http://www.softpres.org/kryoflux:ui:stream-plot

tldr: hardware interface samples FDD head at 25MHz, this allows for more relaxed timings and human assisted interpretation of MFM encoding on degraded media

ps: and if you still have trouble recovering with this hardware there is even more hardcore mod that adds Microstepping head motor controller, cant find the link at the moment :/

I missed that distinction when I posted the link. I'm sure they had difficulty rescuing Price of Persia.

If you have some time to spare, watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnEWBtCnFs8 (or read http://ultimacodex.com/2012/04/saving-prince-of-persias-sour... and the many other sources)

Last year I used a Kyroflux [1] USB floppy controller and an old Teac floppy drive to successfully recover data from a collection of 5.25" floppies (DOS, Apple II, and BBC Micro). The disks dated from the mid 1980s. I'd previously tried an old desktop PC with a on-board floppy controller and the DOS disks were completely unreadable, but the Kryoflux managed to extract the files. I dind't have access to an Apple II or BBC Micro, but I expect that those disks were similarly unreadable.

End result was I got to read the source for some of the first programs and electronic documents that I wrote, which to me was worth the time and effort.

So its not necessarily quite true that "its over". But increasingly expensive and time-consuming measures are likely to be required.

(If anyone wants to buy an almost new Kryoflux then my email address is in my profile. I'm in the UK.)

[1] http://www.kryoflux.com/

I have a bunch of 5.25" floppies from the late 80s (Apple II software) and lots of 3.5" floppies from the early 90s, and a few weeks ago they all seemed to work perfectly fine.

BTW old 3.5" floppies (early 90s) are much, much more reliable then more recent ones. In fact, the latest floppies I bought (2002-2005 or so) are utter crap, and most of them are unusable, and were almost from the start.

Is FidoNet archived anywhere?

I restored my old BBS off 250mb tapes after spending a long time piecing together a system able to read them. I was able to get some random files from the file section, and even got it up and running in DOSBox, login, and read my inbox from 22 years ago. I was actually able to track down one of the ANSI artists who made one of the menus I used because he publicly linked his identity to his past ANSI work. He's a graphic designer now and was happy to get an e-mail bringing back memories of the past :)

Former BBS sysop here. No idea where any of my old backups are. It has been almost 20 years.

When BBS's died it was both quick and quiet. It is hard to describe. It wasnt like a retirement party where we all sat around toasting the years of door games and shareware. Then hit the power button while saying tearful goodbyes. No. It was more like you left for lunch one day and never returned. Not only you, but so did everyone else too. At the time we thought we would come back but we just didn't. No one even knew who was the last person.

I think I have an archive of my old BBS somewhere. I'll go looking tomorrow.

Also, that random dropbox account is now spitting out an error instead of a download.

Luckily, it looks like Jason Scott is already on the case!!

https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/590610390817595393

Very valid comment, I would of reached out this morning, but glad it has been sorted.

Microsoft _is_ good about backwards compatibility...

My first thought when I saw the post. Wouldn't touch with a bargepole. But others... enjoy!

Those viruses are now like characters in a Charles Stross novel, archived for an eternity of being resurrected by tinkerers in simulated DOS universes, briefly blossoming to spread and infect simulated SYS.COMs and COMMAND.COMs, maybe even crossing network bridges into other simulated DOS machines, only to be terminated when the simulations end, again and again.

Viruses back then were more of an annoying nuisance than a big threat to privacy/security... compared to malware today which is almost certainly for commercial gains of some sort.

.ARC was used on MS-DOS systems as well. (Though if the format was ever popular there, it was rare by the time I was old enough to remember.)

Phil Katz of PKZIP fame wrote PKARC and PKXARC - both for MS-DOS. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARC_%28file_format%29

Amazingly, that's still available from the developer: http://www.soleau.com/dosgame.html

Oh wow! I played that but totally forgot. Much fun was had

Soleau software. Those guys cost me many an hour back in the days.