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In mid-late 90s, when floppy disks were not dead yet, I used to help my father to extract lots of files from their devices to floppy disks. They were using flop
by stunt 5y ago
In mid-late 90s, when floppy disks were not dead yet, I used to help my father to extract lots of files from their devices to floppy disks. They were using floppy disks only because an application that they were using to extract and convert data from their devices was designed to only copy files in chunks to floppy disks.
One day, out of curiosity, I opened every single file of the application that they were using to convert and extract data to see if I could make sense of anything. I accidentally found out that there was a config file that had a destination path for copying converted files. It was hard coded to drive A (floppy drive).
I changed the path, tested the application, and it worked. I shared the trick with my father and he shared it with his organization. He became the employee of the year for that discovery.
Floppy disks were expensive on the scale that they were using them, and they often had to deal with a lot of data loss accidents. Their IT team even had a data recovery team specialized to recover data from broken floppy disks because usually it meant they had to send a team back to redo the work.
The storage on the devices they were using was very limited, so often during their week-long operations, they had to extract data before they could continue their work, only to realize later that some chunks were missing from the first part, and then they had to redo that part of operation again.
- aspaviento 5y agoHow did your father react when you told him the trick? And after becoming the employee of the year?