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In the 90s, I bought a Brother word processor machine from a yard sale and I used it for journaling in high school years. It saved to a 3.5" floppy (non-HD?), w
by paulirish 4y ago
In the 90s, I bought a Brother word processor machine from a yard sale and I used it for journaling in high school years. It saved to a 3.5" floppy (non-HD?), which I've kept.
About a decade ago I was hoping to recover the data. I sent it to David at retrofloppy.com who tried his best but failed to recover the data. He sent the disk back to me, and charged me nothing. It was a lovely exchange and I hugely appreciate the folks who keep the door open to legacy technology. (…but meanwhile I'm still realllly curious what's on that disk!)
- kupopuffs 4y agoGet out a microscope and notepad and write down those bits
- Tor3 4y agoIf it was HD then the data is probably gone. Or at least the floppy will have read issues. 720KB should do a bit better. I have recovered data from a lot of old media, CCT tapes, floppies, 3.5" floppies - except that in practice it turned out that a) CCT ok. No problems. b) 8" floppies ok. No problems. c) 5.25" floppies (low density, high density) ok. No problems (except that for a while I didn't have a controller which could read a minority of them - they're FM, not MFM), d) 3.5" Not ok. All unreadable. All of them. And that was not due to the drive - I have lots of drives, including one I bought because it was calibrated. All of the media had been stored either in the same location or in a similar environment, but at this point I don't even bother trying those darn 3.5" floppies unless they're written recently. I'll just be a ton of read errors.