What It Takes to Preserve Floppy Disks

l0new0lf-G 19 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Mostly everyone over 40, and even some younger ones, still have some old floppy disks with files that may or may not be of value.

Somewhere in my mother's house, there still is (hopefully) a floppy disk from 2006-2007 with my teenage self's diary. I wish it is preserved

▲

kev009 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The internally linked article is much better than this https://www.digipres.org/the-floppy-guide/

▲

walrus01 3 hours ago | parent [-]

The part about head cleaning says "high purity" isopropyl alcohol and then says 70-99%. There's little reason to buy anything other than 99%. Additionally some of the same cleaning swabs and wipes sold for fiber optic patch cable and bulkhead connector cleaning are well suited for this.

These are low cost generic/bulk items you can buy from chinese sellers via Amazon or other sources. If it's good enough to clean 9/125 singlemode fiber it should be good enough for floppy drive heads. Ignore the reel-type cleaners that look like a mini betamax tape, and the push click cleaners, which can only be used on real fiber stuff. Go for the swabs and kimtech wipes.

visual examples of what the products look like:

https://focenter.com/products/fiber-optic-cleaning/productio...

https://www.occfiber.com/product/kimtech-lint-free-wipes/

	▲	cryo32 24 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		You should actually dilute it to about 70% with distilled water. It helps penetrate cell membranes and destroy them. You'd be surprised how much fungus and other nasty stuff appears over and inside old tech. I deal with camera lenses myself. But yeah just buy the 99% stuff and some distilled water and do it yourself. You can wash down with distilled water too so having a few litres lying around is quite handy.

▲

londons_explore 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I would like to see approaches to recovering data from fragile disks by placing the inner disk on a flat surface and using some kind of imaging technology to measure the magnetic fields - perhaps an electron microscope could do the job at low enough field strengths?

Using this I imagine it might be possible to not only read the disk data, but perhaps even previous versions of data that has been overwritten.

	▲	userbinator 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Magnetic field cameras exist: https://matesy.de/en/products/cmos-magview https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Visualization_of_magnetic...

▲

shevy-java 34 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Preserving old original floppy disks may be useful, for several reasons, but I myself got rid of all my floppy disks many years ago when USB sticks became viable; even ages ago already, e. g. using CDs and DVDs getting rid of floppy disks - so actually those USB devices killed my use case for floppy disks, CDs and DVDs. I still like DVDs but having USB sticks is simply more convenient in the long run.

	▲	Joel_Mckay 18 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Indeed, some create master disk images with forensic tools, and physical drives: https://github.com/keirf/greaseweazle Then use clean disk images on USB floppy emulators for old equipment: https://github.com/keirf/flashfloppy It is rare to need these tools, but for some folks it is important. =3