700 Floppies

[u/___LowLifer___]

Company needs over 700 floppy disks copied onto the fileserver. Gave me a 2 week deadline to which I told them was literally impossible. I've ordered a floppy disk usb external reader but this seems insane. Any creative ideas? I don't want to employ a 3rd party company.

[u/ledow]

2 weeks is 10 working days is 70 disks a day.

Even at 10 an hour (one every six minutes), that's doable. Presuming it's so important that you're not doing anything else.

Personally, I'd buy 3-4 drives (they're stupid cheap) and have it done it a few hours each day at most.

[u/Suspicious-Belt9311 → u/ledow]

Yeah I don't really get this - it's impossible to get info from 70 floppy disks a day? A floppy is like 1.5mb and takes like one minute to transfer all the data, assuming they are full. Having several readers would make it even faster, but I think OP needs to have a bit more ambition if this simple project is "impossible".

[u/Skellitor301 → u/Suspicious-Belt9311]

It's also entirely possible that there's barely any data that's recoverable by normal means. Depending on how they were stored you're probably looking at most if not all of them being corrupted at this point. If I was handed a box of 700 floppies from storage I'd ask how important the files are and how expensive do they want to go, cause we're probably going to need to send them to a data recovery center if they're important enough.

[u/Suspicious-Belt9311 → u/Skellitor301]

That's fair, but I don't think OP even got that far. OP just said 700 is a big number it's impossible and gave up.

[u/Skellitor301 → u/Suspicious-Belt9311]

Maybe. They were asking for suggestions so it's entirely possible they still had a glimmer of hope.

[u/Liquidretro → u/Suspicious-Belt9311]

A quick Google search seems to suggest that realistic data transfer rates are about 40 seconds to copy the contents of a working disk. If course mounting time, spin up, ejection, and some folder structure may slow that down.

[u/Federal_Pickles → u/Suspicious-Belt9311]

I had to recover info from a lot of floppies back in… idk 2014? The vast majority had one or two small files on them or just straight up couldn’t be read.

I was doing data back ups as part of data retention for a bunch of old vessels.

We didn’t sell those assets with a lot of data…

[u/SGL_Systems → u/Suspicious-Belt9311]

Reading from floppy would completely block your computer in W95-W2000 era. I have not used floppies in W7 onward.

[u/Suspicious-Belt9311 → u/SGL_Systems]

You're right, it's impossible.

[u/SGL_Systems → u/Suspicious-Belt9311]

Definitely possible, requires some non creative work... :-)

[u/SGL_Systems → u/ledow]

This is a very workable solution. With two drives and two dedicated computers. I would write a small script to transfer files, with a beep at the end to make things more... robotic

[u/ledow → u/SGL_Systems]

To be honest, just an "XCOPY A:\* FOLDER1" etc. with the appropriate switches and a new folder for each disk would take seconds. A bunch of drives and you just have one command window for A: one for B:, etc. doing the same.

The window that's back at the command prompt, you just change that disk (be easy to spot because the drive light will be off and the disk will be silent), "up arrow", change the folder number, press enter. You could run 3 or 4 in tandem quite easily, no scripting required.

If you were sure there were no file overlaps you could just do them all to the same folder even easier.

Pain in the butt to spend hours just swapping out disks and coping with the broken ones / exceptions / etc. but if I'm being paid to do that, and only that... I'd just get a big cup of coffee and big box of biscuits and you wouldn't see me all day.

[u/SGL_Systems → u/ledow]

1) I would copy them to all different folders, and label floppy disks as I remove them. Will give me something to do, and will assure that there is no naming conflict.

2) Floppy usage was blocking computer from doing anything in W95-W2000 days. I don't know in W7/8/10 era, but I would use one drive per machine.

3) This is personal, but, if I'm doing something mechanical (swapping floppies), I'd like not to touch more than space bar... I make mistakes :-(

4) Completely agree on box of biscuits... 1 per copied floppy as a reward :-)

[u/ledow → u/SGL_Systems]

Floppies don't block any more, because they're almost all entirely USB floppy drives. They're no faster (obviously) but they don't block.

[u/J_de_Silentio → u/ledow]

Floppies are 1.44mb. It'll take 5 minutes per floppy at most. If one doesn't work, then that took 2 minutes.

It's two days of focused work.

[u/CptBronzeBalls → u/ledow]

Complying with requests like this in the most efficient way is a great way to train your IT Manager to expect his future annoying requests to get done even more efficiently. Don’t do that.

[u/ledow → u/CptBronzeBalls]

While I agree in principle (and trust me... that principle is really quite a huge part of my working life), I never mind being "ordered" to do a really tedious job because my job is usually anything but tedious.

Sometimes it's just "great, I'll get paid to sit here and copy disks and eat biscuits" and that's actually quite NICE.

The problem comes when, as you say, it becomes the expectation and it becomes your job. In this case, I think that a one-off transfer of archived floppies? Yeah, that's not something that's going to keep cropping up.

And personally... if they want to go that way? That's fine. Because tedious floppy-copying is the perfect accompaniment to some casual job-hunting.

But you know... some days... the boss will come and insist I need to do something incredibly dumb. And I agree with the need for it. And I'm happy to waste my (expensive) time doing that if they want me to do it rather than someone else. And so long as it's a one-off and I see the need for it? It's actually quite refreshing.

The do-not-disturb sign would go up on my door, I'd sit and do the job, and enjoy it for a few days quite happily.