5 ms·

The people rescuing forgotten knowledge trapped on old floppy disks

110 points by jnord 1y ago

scyzoryk_xyz 1y ago
I wouldn't want to be trapped on an old floppy disk.
noir_lord 1y ago
The 3" format disks mentioned in the article where "common" in the UK on the Spectrum +3 (which had a built in floppy drive), I owned one at one point. The lore is that the world was moving to 3.5 and Alan Sugar (who owned Spectrum brand later after Amstrad bought them out) got a huge job lot of drives and disks cheap so they used them for the +3 as well as the existing CPC systems that had them (in fact the +3 used a modified version of AMDOS which ran the drives on the CPC). It wasn't a terrible spectrum but it was already very obsolete by the time it was released.
- michalpleban 1y ago
  It's a myth. Amstrad computers were already using 3 inch drives in 1984, way before 3.5 inch ones became popular. The drives were chosen due to their similarity to 5.25 drives, so that existing controller chips could be reused. Due to the huge volume of ordered drives, Amstrad did get huge discounts on them, but that had nothing to with the drives becoming obsolete.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  I was envious of my friends that owned one, versus my Timex 2068. It had a much better BASIC, and CP/M was also available (CP/M Plus).
  - noir_lord 1y ago
    I didn't get the +3 til years after they launched and already had an "old" (not to me) Olivetti PC1 and not long after an Elonex 286 so the +3 was just games really for me at that point - once I got access to Turbo Pascal I had no interest in programming BASIC any more.
    - pjmlp 1y ago
      Same here regarding Turbo Pascal, however I first had to go through GW-BASIC and Turbo BASIC, with a bit of Z80, 68000 and 80x86 before getting into Turbo Pascal. Between the Amstrad PC1512 at the school club, the other friends lucky enough to have Amiga 500 which organized demoscene like parties at their places, until I finally got hold of a 386SX.
- rwmj 1y ago
  The Amstrad PCW word processor was also very widespread in UK offices, and that used 3" disks so there must be tons of letters, interoffice memos and other office documents out there in that format. Of course that's only half the problem, the other half is that it used a very strange word processor called Locoscript (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_PCW https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_PCW)
JKCalhoun 1y ago
Nothing on the level of Stephen Hawking's notes, but I handed off a decent sized stack of early Mac floppies to some "archivists" at a recent vintage computer festival. I understand there was a commercial game or two in the mix that had not yet been archived from the original floppy (on Macintosh Garden or archive.org). I'm not sure what else was there that they'll find interesting. Maybe they'll let me know. I worked in a Mac lab briefly in college and we ran Disinfectant from time to time on the lab machines. Sometimes we would find Mac viruses infecting a file or two and I collected a few of these on a floppy. The archivist seemed delighted to have a few disks with "contained" Mac viruses as well.
- sema4hacker 1y ago
  A few years ago I had a Mac floppy from the 90's I could no longer read but wanted to retrieve a file from. I sent it to a data recovery service that had high expectations of success, but they failed too. It was so disappointing.
  - SoftTalker 1y ago
    I'm surprised anything is recoverable on disks that old. When I used floppy disks routinely, their lifespan was a matter of months if they were used regularly. For stuff I was working on daily, I would always save it twice to separate disks. I'd be fortunate to get through a school term without having disk errors, so I learned pretty quickly the value of having multiple copies. For stuff that was just archives, saved and then rarely accessed, they would survive longer. My guess is just that the read/write heads were fairly abrasive and wore down the magnetic layer of the disks pretty quickly under heavy use.
    - M95D 1y ago
      I saw a 8086 in '96 that still booted every day from the same 360KB floppy (no HDD).
    - GaryBluto 1y ago
      My experience is that floppies generally last long. I volunteered for a charity and was sorting through book donations a couple of months ago and I found a floppy hidden in a hollowed out book (presumably mistakenly donated) containing files dated from 2004.
ksec 1y ago
Oh Nice, I tried to submit this but never got on to the front page. We really need something that could store data for 80 years minimum. Which is really just a life time of a person. Stored well and right paper could out last all of our digital alternatives. The M-DISC is expensive per GB, and I think they went bankrupt in 2020, and BlueRay disc is too small in capacity. At this rate of things we may never own anything physical again.
- noir_lord 1y ago
  Archival LTO has a life of 30 years (under proper storage) - likely longer but they "warranty" for 30 years. The issue is that anything you made like that would need to be forward readable because storage capacity demands only ever increase over time. i.e. imagine a 1.44MB 80 year floppy disk from 1985, while it'd last til 2065 no one would use it in 2025 because you'd need about a thousand of them to hold a modern 4K video
  - namibj 1y ago
    You need to very carefully dry it, possibly with a re spooling to destress, and then keep it at or below 18C, but it has to be stable. Though the same applies to polycarbonate/acrylic-glue BD-R. If you do that they'll keep for centuries, at least the tapes that use oxygen resistant magnetic particles like BaFe (not MP). Calcium oxide aka burnt lime is a cheap non-toxic (but caustic!) desiccant that can keep an e.g. paint can dry for centuries.
    - noir_lord 1y ago
      Aye, I suspect under perfect conditions, one write, optimal storage conditions it'll be more than the 30 years some tapes are specced for. I find it entertaining that high speed magnetic tape - a technology in the consumer space that is basically obsolete is still one of the optimal solutions for "I have hundreds of terabytes of data I need to be able to read in 15 years".
- weaverheavy 1y ago
  >We really need something that could store data for 80 years minimum. Minidisc. I have discs that are 30+ years old that have been abused their entire life and still work fine with no noticeable degradation. I specifically choose this format to archive audio because the disc housing works great for environmental protection and I’d eventually like to give my music collection to my children/grand children. The discs can also store data. My minidisc player shows up as removable storage device when I plug it into my computer so I can throw anywhere from about 140mb-1Gb(hi-MD) per disk. Officially they’re rated to about 50 years, but if you sealed them and stored them properly then they could easily make it past 80 years.
nubinetwork 1y ago
Anyone can do this, buy a grease weasel.
mellosouls 1y ago
Nice article, cool jumper!
- herjazz 1y ago
  Agreed. She goes into more depth how she made them here: https://digitalpreservation-blog.lib.cam.ac.uk/knitting-through-digital-decay-a-collection-of-digital-preservation-jumpers-no-one-asked-for-but-478c48009521 https://digitalpreservation-blog.lib.cam.ac.uk/knitting-thro...
noufalibrahim 1y ago
My oldest programs in gw basic are on 5.25" DD disks. I still have them but they're probably unreadable now due to fungus on the platters. There was a great talk by Jason Scott (textiles) on how he dug out Jordan Mechners original prince of persia source code from the sands of time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9xNzZMeX5I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9xNzZMeX5I
- Cthulhu_ 1y ago
  > original prince of persia source code from the sands of time. I see what you did there
  - noufalibrahim 1y ago
    Had to be said. I believe that was the title of the original talk too
- 2mlWQbCK 1y ago
  > My oldest programs in gw basic are on 5.25" DD disks Mine as well, but luckily many years ago I copied all the contents of my old floppies to CD-ROMs, and then later all the CD-ROMs to DVDs, and finally to USB-harddisks, and now all the files live happily (hopefully forever) in my hoard ZFS (and several off-site backups). The only significant exception is most 1.2 MB floppies. Those were also 5.25", but the drives were much more difficult to calibrate well. Can't get the files from almost any of those. A few I can list the filenames, but not access the file contents. Most are just unreadable. I could not even find a drive that worked well enough to copy those using my KryoFlux. (* Not that there is anything at all of real value on all those old floppies. This is pure nostalgia/hoarding.)
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
toomuchtodo 1y ago
Archival Floppy Disk Preservation and Use - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxsRpMdmlGo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxsRpMdmlGo https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39495973 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39495973 - February 2024 (23 comments) https://wiki.techtangents.net/wiki/Floppy_Disk_Imaging https://wiki.techtangents.net/wiki/Floppy_Disk_Imaging https://github.com/keirf/greaseweazle https://github.com/keirf/greaseweazle https://kryoflux.com/ https://kryoflux.com/
- rasz 1y ago
  https://github.com/davidgiven/fluxengine https://github.com/davidgiven/fluxengine and my little contribution if you have a $5 logic analyzer board (FX2LP) and want to play in Sigrok/PulseView/DSView https://github.com/raszpl/sigrok-mfm https://github.com/raszpl/sigrok-mfm
- 2mlWQbCK 1y ago
  There was a few mentions of KryoFlux in the X-Copy article linked from HN 4 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45552913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45552913 (X-Copy developer Christian Bartsch that is interviewed now works on KryoFlux.)
bookofjoe 1y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45597763 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45597763
pmarreck 1y ago
I have written 2 utilities that may be of use to digital archivists: printable-binary: A way to visualize/serialize raw binary data into a string form that doesn't break terminals (converts to/from specially-selected utf8 glyphs that stay monospaced in most fonts) which has some unique features: https://github.com/pmarreck/printable-binary https://github.com/pmarreck/printable-binary bitrot_guard (yeah, apparently I can't decide whether to use hyphens or underscores in names yet, lol): A way to restore a user-configurable percent of data degradation in a file or set of files... without touching the original files. Only dependency is par2: https://github.com/pmarreck/bitrot_guard https://github.com/pmarreck/bitrot_guard Both should work on macOS/Linux/WSL.
- walkabout 1y ago
  > yeah, apparently I can't decide whether to use hyphens or underscores in names yet, lol Go the Python route and hyphenate the name but use underscores in the import, for maximum confusion and searchability disruption.
  - giantrobot 1y ago
    Come on bro, trigger warning please!
  - pmarreck 1y ago
    Knowing the Python philosophy, I assume that's the "one true way" to address the naming distinction across the board?
paultopia 1y ago
The differences in disk size and software needed to access the Hawking material is typical of the early floppy disk era. "There wasn't one system that dominated the market," Talboom explains. "It was a bit of a wild west out there." Good heavens this makes me feel ancient. Do today's BBC readers really not know that there were two main sizes of floppy disk?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- throawayonthe 1y ago
  i don't think that's the type of knowledge you can expect fron even contenporary non-technical readers
- Aloha 1y ago
  I mean.. no? 8" 5 1/4" 3 1/2" and a couple less standard ones, then you get into sectoring (hard, soft), sidedness and density, plus disk formats on top of that
  - fragmede 1y ago
    proprietary zip and later jaz drives as well
    - paultopia 1y ago
      Hah I still have some Zip disks sitting in a drawer, completely unreadable
  - jve 1y ago
    This list is wild: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_floppy_disk_formats https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_floppy_disk_formats
- coldpie 1y ago
  That wouldn't be at all surprising, no. Floppy disks were all but gone by the turn of the century. People born after 9/11, who will never have encountered floppy disks, are in their mid-20s and having their own kids by now.
onair4you 1y ago
A bit back I got a https://kryoflux.com/ https://kryoflux.com/ to try to get some data off old Apple II disks. I think I successfully captured the images, but then I couldn’t really find any tools that would left me examine the filesystems.
- rasz 1y ago
  https://github.com/davidgiven/fluxengine https://github.com/davidgiven/fluxengine
  - onair4you 1y ago
    That’s not the issue. I have the images. I just can’t find any Linux or macOS tools that can interpret the data. For example, I can mount the FAT images I have for MS-DOS 35 years ago, but not these.
    - rasz 1y ago
      Thats exactly what fluxengine is for. You load flux image and it exposes the filesystem https://cowlark.com/fluxengine/doc/filesystem.html https://cowlark.com/fluxengine/doc/filesystem.html
NoSalt 1y ago
What a journey our data has taken: 5¼ floppy → 3.5" floppy → Zip/Jazz Disks → CD/DVD Discs → Hard Drives → Cloud Storage → Self-Hosted RAID
mosselman 1y ago
Firstly, I think it is really cool that people are archiving potentially interesting material. Secondly, however, the idea that people, after my death, would spend hours and hours on end going through all of my computers to see what is on there, seems like a nightmare at some level.
2mlWQbCK 1y ago
Swedish government archives (Riksarkivet) (IIRC; could have been some library or other archive?) used to have a page asking for donations of equipment that can be used to read old disks/discs/tapes. Basically any kind of drives, old computers that those drives can be used with etc, precisely for this reason that sometimes the archive have to rescue data from ancient media. Can't find it now so not sure if it is still up, but I can't imagine they ended up with enough equipment that they will never need more. Must be something all archives struggle with and there will always be some format they do not already have equipment for, or some machine they need spare parts for?
phendrenad2 1y ago
What's really interesting about floppy disks is, if you find one from the late 80s or early 90s, it'll probably still be readable. Try to read a CD-R from 2000 and you don't have such good luck.

110 points by jnord 1y ago

I wouldn't want to be trapped on an old floppy disk.

The 3" format disks mentioned in the article where "common" in the UK on the Spectrum +3 (which had a built in floppy drive), I owned one at one point. The lore is that the world was moving to 3.5 and Alan Sugar (who owned Spectrum brand later after Amstrad bought them out) got a huge job lot of drives and disks cheap so they used them for the +3 as well as the existing CPC systems that had them (in fact the +3 used a modified version of AMDOS which ran the drives on the CPC). It wasn't a terrible spectrum but it was already very obsolete by the time it was released.

michalpleban 1y ago
It's a myth. Amstrad computers were already using 3 inch drives in 1984, way before 3.5 inch ones became popular. The drives were chosen due to their similarity to 5.25 drives, so that existing controller chips could be reused. Due to the huge volume of ordered drives, Amstrad did get huge discounts on them, but that had nothing to with the drives becoming obsolete.
pjmlp 1y ago
I was envious of my friends that owned one, versus my Timex 2068. It had a much better BASIC, and CP/M was also available (CP/M Plus).
- noir_lord 1y ago
  I didn't get the +3 til years after they launched and already had an "old" (not to me) Olivetti PC1 and not long after an Elonex 286 so the +3 was just games really for me at that point - once I got access to Turbo Pascal I had no interest in programming BASIC any more.
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    Same here regarding Turbo Pascal, however I first had to go through GW-BASIC and Turbo BASIC, with a bit of Z80, 68000 and 80x86 before getting into Turbo Pascal. Between the Amstrad PC1512 at the school club, the other friends lucky enough to have Amiga 500 which organized demoscene like parties at their places, until I finally got hold of a 386SX.
rwmj 1y ago
The Amstrad PCW word processor was also very widespread in UK offices, and that used 3" disks so there must be tons of letters, interoffice memos and other office documents out there in that format. Of course that's only half the problem, the other half is that it used a very strange word processor called Locoscript (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_PCW https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_PCW)

JKCalhoun 1y ago

Nothing on the level of Stephen Hawking's notes, but I handed off a decent sized stack of early Mac floppies to some "archivists" at a recent vintage computer festival. I understand there was a commercial game or two in the mix that had not yet been archived from the original floppy (on Macintosh Garden or archive.org). I'm not sure what else was there that they'll find interesting. Maybe they'll let me know. I worked in a Mac lab briefly in college and we ran Disinfectant from time to time on the lab machines. Sometimes we would find Mac viruses infecting a file or two and I collected a few of these on a floppy. The archivist seemed delighted to have a few disks with "contained" Mac viruses as well.

sema4hacker 1y ago
A few years ago I had a Mac floppy from the 90's I could no longer read but wanted to retrieve a file from. I sent it to a data recovery service that had high expectations of success, but they failed too. It was so disappointing.
- SoftTalker 1y ago
  I'm surprised anything is recoverable on disks that old. When I used floppy disks routinely, their lifespan was a matter of months if they were used regularly. For stuff I was working on daily, I would always save it twice to separate disks. I'd be fortunate to get through a school term without having disk errors, so I learned pretty quickly the value of having multiple copies. For stuff that was just archives, saved and then rarely accessed, they would survive longer. My guess is just that the read/write heads were fairly abrasive and wore down the magnetic layer of the disks pretty quickly under heavy use.
  - M95D 1y ago
    I saw a 8086 in '96 that still booted every day from the same 360KB floppy (no HDD).
  - GaryBluto 1y ago
    My experience is that floppies generally last long. I volunteered for a charity and was sorting through book donations a couple of months ago and I found a floppy hidden in a hollowed out book (presumably mistakenly donated) containing files dated from 2004.

ksec 1y ago

Oh Nice, I tried to submit this but never got on to the front page. We really need something that could store data for 80 years minimum. Which is really just a life time of a person. Stored well and right paper could out last all of our digital alternatives. The M-DISC is expensive per GB, and I think they went bankrupt in 2020, and BlueRay disc is too small in capacity. At this rate of things we may never own anything physical again.

noir_lord 1y ago
Archival LTO has a life of 30 years (under proper storage) - likely longer but they "warranty" for 30 years. The issue is that anything you made like that would need to be forward readable because storage capacity demands only ever increase over time. i.e. imagine a 1.44MB 80 year floppy disk from 1985, while it'd last til 2065 no one would use it in 2025 because you'd need about a thousand of them to hold a modern 4K video
- namibj 1y ago
  You need to very carefully dry it, possibly with a re spooling to destress, and then keep it at or below 18C, but it has to be stable. Though the same applies to polycarbonate/acrylic-glue BD-R. If you do that they'll keep for centuries, at least the tapes that use oxygen resistant magnetic particles like BaFe (not MP). Calcium oxide aka burnt lime is a cheap non-toxic (but caustic!) desiccant that can keep an e.g. paint can dry for centuries.
  - noir_lord 1y ago
    Aye, I suspect under perfect conditions, one write, optimal storage conditions it'll be more than the 30 years some tapes are specced for. I find it entertaining that high speed magnetic tape - a technology in the consumer space that is basically obsolete is still one of the optimal solutions for "I have hundreds of terabytes of data I need to be able to read in 15 years".
weaverheavy 1y ago
>We really need something that could store data for 80 years minimum. Minidisc. I have discs that are 30+ years old that have been abused their entire life and still work fine with no noticeable degradation. I specifically choose this format to archive audio because the disc housing works great for environmental protection and I’d eventually like to give my music collection to my children/grand children. The discs can also store data. My minidisc player shows up as removable storage device when I plug it into my computer so I can throw anywhere from about 140mb-1Gb(hi-MD) per disk. Officially they’re rated to about 50 years, but if you sealed them and stored them properly then they could easily make it past 80 years.

nubinetwork 1y ago

Anyone can do this, buy a grease weasel.

mellosouls 1y ago

Nice article, cool jumper!

herjazz 1y ago
Agreed. She goes into more depth how she made them here: https://digitalpreservation-blog.lib.cam.ac.uk/knitting-through-digital-decay-a-collection-of-digital-preservation-jumpers-no-one-asked-for-but-478c48009521 https://digitalpreservation-blog.lib.cam.ac.uk/knitting-thro...

noufalibrahim 1y ago

My oldest programs in gw basic are on 5.25" DD disks. I still have them but they're probably unreadable now due to fungus on the platters. There was a great talk by Jason Scott (textiles) on how he dug out Jordan Mechners original prince of persia source code from the sands of time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9xNzZMeX5I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9xNzZMeX5I

Cthulhu_ 1y ago
> original prince of persia source code from the sands of time. I see what you did there
- noufalibrahim 1y ago
  Had to be said. I believe that was the title of the original talk too
2mlWQbCK 1y ago
> My oldest programs in gw basic are on 5.25" DD disks Mine as well, but luckily many years ago I copied all the contents of my old floppies to CD-ROMs, and then later all the CD-ROMs to DVDs, and finally to USB-harddisks, and now all the files live happily (hopefully forever) in my hoard ZFS (and several off-site backups). The only significant exception is most 1.2 MB floppies. Those were also 5.25", but the drives were much more difficult to calibrate well. Can't get the files from almost any of those. A few I can list the filenames, but not access the file contents. Most are just unreadable. I could not even find a drive that worked well enough to copy those using my KryoFlux. (* Not that there is anything at all of real value on all those old floppies. This is pure nostalgia/hoarding.)

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

toomuchtodo 1y ago

Archival Floppy Disk Preservation and Use - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxsRpMdmlGo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxsRpMdmlGo https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39495973 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39495973 - February 2024 (23 comments) https://wiki.techtangents.net/wiki/Floppy_Disk_Imaging https://wiki.techtangents.net/wiki/Floppy_Disk_Imaging https://github.com/keirf/greaseweazle https://github.com/keirf/greaseweazle https://kryoflux.com/ https://kryoflux.com/

rasz 1y ago
https://github.com/davidgiven/fluxengine https://github.com/davidgiven/fluxengine and my little contribution if you have a $5 logic analyzer board (FX2LP) and want to play in Sigrok/PulseView/DSView https://github.com/raszpl/sigrok-mfm https://github.com/raszpl/sigrok-mfm
2mlWQbCK 1y ago
There was a few mentions of KryoFlux in the X-Copy article linked from HN 4 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45552913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45552913 (X-Copy developer Christian Bartsch that is interviewed now works on KryoFlux.)

bookofjoe 1y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45597763 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45597763

pmarreck 1y ago

I have written 2 utilities that may be of use to digital archivists: printable-binary: A way to visualize/serialize raw binary data into a string form that doesn't break terminals (converts to/from specially-selected utf8 glyphs that stay monospaced in most fonts) which has some unique features: https://github.com/pmarreck/printable-binary https://github.com/pmarreck/printable-binary bitrot_guard (yeah, apparently I can't decide whether to use hyphens or underscores in names yet, lol): A way to restore a user-configurable percent of data degradation in a file or set of files... without touching the original files. Only dependency is par2: https://github.com/pmarreck/bitrot_guard https://github.com/pmarreck/bitrot_guard Both should work on macOS/Linux/WSL.

walkabout 1y ago
> yeah, apparently I can't decide whether to use hyphens or underscores in names yet, lol Go the Python route and hyphenate the name but use underscores in the import, for maximum confusion and searchability disruption.
- giantrobot 1y ago
  Come on bro, trigger warning please!
- pmarreck 1y ago
  Knowing the Python philosophy, I assume that's the "one true way" to address the naming distinction across the board?

paultopia 1y ago

The differences in disk size and software needed to access the Hawking material is typical of the early floppy disk era. "There wasn't one system that dominated the market," Talboom explains. "It was a bit of a wild west out there." Good heavens this makes me feel ancient. Do today's BBC readers really not know that there were two main sizes of floppy disk?

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
throawayonthe 1y ago
i don't think that's the type of knowledge you can expect fron even contenporary non-technical readers
Aloha 1y ago
I mean.. no? 8" 5 1/4" 3 1/2" and a couple less standard ones, then you get into sectoring (hard, soft), sidedness and density, plus disk formats on top of that
- fragmede 1y ago
  proprietary zip and later jaz drives as well
  - paultopia 1y ago
    Hah I still have some Zip disks sitting in a drawer, completely unreadable
- jve 1y ago
  This list is wild: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_floppy_disk_formats https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_floppy_disk_formats
coldpie 1y ago
That wouldn't be at all surprising, no. Floppy disks were all but gone by the turn of the century. People born after 9/11, who will never have encountered floppy disks, are in their mid-20s and having their own kids by now.

onair4you 1y ago

A bit back I got a https://kryoflux.com/ https://kryoflux.com/ to try to get some data off old Apple II disks. I think I successfully captured the images, but then I couldn’t really find any tools that would left me examine the filesystems.

rasz 1y ago
https://github.com/davidgiven/fluxengine https://github.com/davidgiven/fluxengine
- onair4you 1y ago
  That’s not the issue. I have the images. I just can’t find any Linux or macOS tools that can interpret the data. For example, I can mount the FAT images I have for MS-DOS 35 years ago, but not these.
  - rasz 1y ago
    Thats exactly what fluxengine is for. You load flux image and it exposes the filesystem https://cowlark.com/fluxengine/doc/filesystem.html https://cowlark.com/fluxengine/doc/filesystem.html

NoSalt 1y ago

What a journey our data has taken: 5¼ floppy → 3.5" floppy → Zip/Jazz Disks → CD/DVD Discs → Hard Drives → Cloud Storage → Self-Hosted RAID

mosselman 1y ago

Firstly, I think it is really cool that people are archiving potentially interesting material. Secondly, however, the idea that people, after my death, would spend hours and hours on end going through all of my computers to see what is on there, seems like a nightmare at some level.

2mlWQbCK 1y ago

Swedish government archives (Riksarkivet) (IIRC; could have been some library or other archive?) used to have a page asking for donations of equipment that can be used to read old disks/discs/tapes. Basically any kind of drives, old computers that those drives can be used with etc, precisely for this reason that sometimes the archive have to rescue data from ancient media. Can't find it now so not sure if it is still up, but I can't imagine they ended up with enough equipment that they will never need more. Must be something all archives struggle with and there will always be some format they do not already have equipment for, or some machine they need spare parts for?

phendrenad2 1y ago

What's really interesting about floppy disks is, if you find one from the late 80s or early 90s, it'll probably still be readable. Try to read a CD-R from 2000 and you don't have such good luck.