5 ms·
It just hit me that when I was doing IT support for some departments in college I laughed at how antiquated tape storage backups were as I saved my papers and h
by Yhippa 3y ago
It just hit me that when I was doing IT support for some departments in college I laughed at how antiquated tape storage backups were as I saved my papers and homework on to magnetic storage 3.5" floppy drives.
- Tor3 3y agoThat is funny of course (in hindsight), at least if you tried to save on 1.44MB 3.5" floppies. When I was restoring all of my old tapes and floppies I could recover nearly all my 9-track CCT tapes, nearly 100% of my 5.25" floppies (various densities, including 1.2MB), many 720KB 3.5" floppies (8" ones are also good) and zero 1.44MB 3.5" floppies. Discussed this with many other people who had basically the same experience with HD 3.5". All of these were stored in the same physical environment. Some other tape media weren't particularly good (exabyte, 4mm tape etc, but then again those used to fail at the very beginning).
- bombolo 3y agoInteresting… all of my dad's 5.25 failed.
- dspillett 3y agoIf all the disks failed it could be the recording drive, assuming they weren't separately verified at the time or writing or since. Our school's collection of BBCs included one drive that could read everything, including data it had created, but most of the other drives would reject anything it had written. Once identified that drive was taken out of general circulation and only used to read data for writing to a new disk in a second drive, and eventually skipped once it was unlikely any data someone cared about had been written by it and not copied elsewhere. This often comes down to regularly testing old data. Floppies shouldn't have been used for archive storage but often were, with a problem only being noticed years down the line when the data needed to be read. Other media similarly: recorded CDs and DVDs from a decade or more ago are sometimes not readable now. An archive is only an archive if you can actually read it, much like an untested backup is just a hope not really a backup.
- Keyframe 3y agoX68000 designers had some foresight. Compact version, not so much.
- cout 3y agoIs there any way to recover the failed disks? Or are the bits lost forever?
- IIsi50MHz 3y agoThere are tools that record the actual magnetic flux from the disc, over multiple passes. In skilled hands, this has resulted in some "irreparable" discs being recovered. The most prominent one I know is KryoFlux.
- darkwater 3y agoMight be because 3.5 disks outnumbered in production quantities any other kind of floppy disk, thus the average quality was lower? Massive production lowers costs, so to keep sane margins they just decreased quality? Or is there any theory about the technology itself being less reliable?
- Tor3 3y agoFrom what I've gathered the issue was simply that for the HD 3.5" floppies the density was actually more than the medium could take. 720KB had lower density and didn't have that problem.
- fuzz_junket 3y agoA friend in high-school used to do the old trick of copying a DLL onto a floppy disk, renaming it "essay.doc", and handing it in to the teacher. Next week he'd feign concern that the disk must have got corrupted somehow, but by then he'd bought himself an extra week to write the paper. It was a different time...
- systems_glitch 3y agoI had a QuickBASIC program that'd spit out a generic disk error screen, and later a Visual BASIC program that'd put up a Windows dialog saying that it needed to be open on NT 4 or later (school system was Win9x at the time). Good to hear we all slacked off the same :P
- chatmasta 3y agoA friend of mine in college (much more recently) did a similar trick with Google Docs - "oops, forgot to share it with your email." Students adapt to the times...