Within the past few days, someone commented with a link to "Floppy Disks: It's Too Late" (2011) from Jason Scott's blog.
Here's an excerpt:
It’s over. You waited too long. You procrastinated or
made excuses or otherwise didn’t think about it or care.
You didn’t do anything and it’s too late now. ...
If you still have boxes of floppies sitting in your
attic or basement or grandparents’ place or wherever
else, I’m telling you the days of it being a semi-
dependable storehouse are over. It’s been too long, too
much, and you’ve asked too much of what the floppies
were ever designed to do.
http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3191
That's for 5 1/4" disks.
The situation sounds more hopeful for 3 1/2" disks - but if you still have some, now is the time to get that data off.
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/
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.)
I haven't tried this myself. However, there are various threads (eg. [1][2]) on the Kryoflux support forum where people have reported success, and others ([3][4]) that are more mixed. The Kryoflux manual [5] also says its works with an 8" Shugart 851 drive, and that there are firmware options to support 8" drive timings.
According to an answer on [3] an 8" drive needs to be "Shugart compliant", and in [4] it is mentioned that an adapter made by DBIT is needed to convert the 34-pin floppy cable to the 50-pin interface apparently used by 8" drives. The Kryoflux I have wasn't supplied with a 50-pin cable, so that would need to be sourced.
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.
Definitely doesn't sit with my subjective memory of what using floppies was like...then again by the mid 90s a pirated game would often take 10+ floppies so with a ~10% failure rate you had a pretty good chance of getting a bad one thus rendering the whole batch useless (couldn't play the game if a single arj/zip file was lost due to bad sectors on its diskette).
I also wonder how quick rewriting new content wore them out.
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.
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 :/
Please for God's sake digitize the whole lot.. there is an entire history of a barely documented civilization on these disks, and it reminds me of something else:
BBS operators of the 80s and 90s, where are the copies of those hard drives that you took out of that 286 before you binned it? Google may have bought and destroyed Dejanews, but you're hoarding something much more valuable (IMHO!)
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 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 :)
Unfortunately, no. There is no comprehensive archive. There are bits and pieces on the web plus several Fido boards still running with archives going back a decade or so.
Can someone (OP?) please ask this user to upload this content to the Internet Archive (archive.org)? They love this kind of stuff, and it'll be stored much more permanently there than it would be in a random Dropbox account.
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.
I had a bunch of IBM Big Blue Disks, and now I can only find a couple on shady sites. Someone must have more because all of the Alfredo animation demos are on YouTube. Perhaps I should send them a message. I got ahold of the current owners of Softdisk but they didn't have an archive. Oh well... Perhaps some things are just meant to be lost. Maybe any IBM people can nose around corporate archives?
Depending upon age of content, you might want to look for one of the DOS-based CP/M emulators in there. I recall one called... Nice22, I think. There were others.
--
Quick search turned this up:
CP/M Frequently Asked Questions: Q20: How do you unpack a .ARK or .ARC file?
Here's an excerpt:
That's for 5 1/4" disks.The situation sounds more hopeful for 3 1/2" disks - but if you still have some, now is the time to get that data off.