Future Nostalgia Project asks retro hoarders to ‘Copy That Floppy!’ — flips the early 1990s anti-piracy campaign on its head to encourage budding archivists

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Future Nostalgia Project asks retro hoarders to ‘Copy That Floppy!’ — flips the early 1990s anti-piracy campaign on its head to encourage budding archivists

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The published guide focuses mostly on saving the material stored on the old removable media. Rewriting the disks to new media and/or accessing the old data that was squirreled within is beyond the scope of the still extensive guide. However, there are links provided to further guides and documentation that cover those subsequent steps.

I originally acquired a good-condition working USB floppy drive from the iMac era to image my collection of 3.5-inch floppies dating back to the 16-bit era. Buying a USB-attached optical drive has already been great for accessing and imaging old CDs and DVDs. However, due to the mix of (poorly labeled) Atari ST, Amiga (OFS, FFS, PFS), PC, Mac, and even Archimedes floppies, I have the USB floppy, which doesn’t cut it. I had to acquire a Greaseweazle because a PC‑compatible USB floppy drive cannot read or write the raw, low‑level disk formats used by Amiga, classic Macintosh, and many other vintage systems.

It’s a bit of a rabbit hole in a minefield, but some vintage used drives you can get via places like eBay are better than others at reading flux transitions (the raw magnetic pulses on the disk) on non- IBM formats. Then, when you image disks, and it isn’t 100% successful, you wonder if your drive is the problem or if it’s the old media…

My first diskette archiving tests immediately hit a speedbump. After a lot of forum reading and investigating, I determined the used 3.5-inch floppy drive I’d sourced to pair with my Greaseweazle had one malfunctioning head. Having the other USB floppy drive allowed me to verify that using a standard PC disk.

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Related posts:

  1. Future Nostalgia Project asks retro hoarders to ‘Copy That Floppy!’ — flips the early 1990s anti-piracy campaign on its head to encourage budding archivists
  2. Future Nostalgia Project asks retro hoarders to ‘Copy That Floppy!’ — flips the early 1990s anti-piracy campaign on its head to encourage budding archivists
  3. Relive the PC magazine cover disk era with 758-strong archive.org CD-ROM collection — 1.2TB treasure trove also includes Floppy Disks from as early as 1993
  4. Relive the PC magazine cover disk era with 758-strong archive.org CD-ROM collection — 1.2TB treasure trove also includes Floppy Disks from as early as 1993

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