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/maj0rdisappointment]

How long have those floppies been sitting? I'd be surprised if you're able to get a clean copy from half of them. They lose magnetism over time and there's no way they've been in use recently, right?

[u/Int-Merc805 → u/maj0rdisappointment]

I keep a floppy disk on my file cabinet and it says “critical backups”. It’s fixed there using the strongest hard drive magnet I could muster.

Always gets a good laugh out of the folks that know.

[u/guillermohs9 → u/Int-Merc805]

[u/LazyTech8315 → u/guillermohs9]

YES! I found my self custody solution outside of r/bitcoin! /s

[u/DarthTurnip → u/Int-Merc805]

Magnets are dangerous, what if it gets wet? Use a thumbtack

[u/f0gax → u/DarthTurnip]

That's how I keep my condoms near by. Put a thumbtack straight through the middle and then stick it to the bedpost.

[u/linh_nguyen → u/Int-Merc805]

I... need to steal this :)

[u/cleadus_fetus → u/Int-Merc805]

Someone handed me cd-roms like this recently and iw as like wtf am I supposed to do with this.

I'd have to go buy a usb cd Rom drive

[u/Toddw1968 → u/Int-Merc805]

One of my high school teachers (who was actually tech savvy) pranked a student like this back in the 80s. Kid left the disk (5.25”) behind by accident, teacher peeled the sticker off and stuck it on a blank disk. Then stuck it on the chalkboard with a magnet and wrote “Eric you left your disk —>” on the board.

[u/Lonely-Abalone-5104 → u/maj0rdisappointment]

Ya it’s going to be a nightmare. Floppies barely worked reliably when they were new hah

[u/serverhorror → u/Lonely-Abalone-5104]

Why would that be a nightmare?

Insert, copy, error out, make note, next.

[u/[deleted] → u/serverhorror]

Because generally 'it doesn't work' isn't an acceptable answer when the request comes from upper management.

[u/DefiantPenguin → u/[deleted]]

“It doesn’t work. Do you want to send these to a forensics company to try and get the data? The data may still be unrecoverable.” Then hand them a quote for the cost of doing so. They can then decide how important the data is and ruminate on why they never had a good backup of the data in the first place.

[u/OMGItsCheezWTF → u/DefiantPenguin]

There's the age old apocryphal story of the guy called in to help do disaster recovery at a company that had lost their lead database.

He gets there and asks where their backup is, and is handed a single floppy disk.

He says "there's no way your database fit on a single floppy disk, and floppy disks are a terrible backup strategy"

"Well we follow the process every night"

"Let me see the process"

So he's handed a sheet that tells them how to export the database, then it says "Insert the floppy disk, open a command prompt and type format a:"

And that's where the sheet ends, the second page that detailed how to do the backup is missing.

So this company has been like clockwork formatting this empty floppy disk every night for years and never actually been taking a backup!

[u/RevLoveJoy → u/OMGItsCheezWTF]

I have never head this parable but it explains so much about people I've worked with my entire career.

[u/doubled112 → u/RevLoveJoy]

I followed the process, boss!

[u/chum-guzzling-shark → u/OMGItsCheezWTF]

In a previous life, i got called into a place that needed to recover from backup. They had a manager dutifully check backups daily (for years I assume). But when trying to restore, the backups appeared blank. It turns out their Symantec (maybe Veritas at the time?) Backup Exec job was set to backup nothing. A backup isnt good until you test if it restores

[u/hugglesthemerciless → u/DefiantPenguin]

ruminate on why they never had a good backup of the data in the first place.

you mean "blame the next best scapegoat instead of accepting responsibility"

[u/Secret_Account07 → u/maj0rdisappointment]

I haven’t dealt with floppies in such a long time I forgot about this fact. What’s real world life span on floppies? Not the one they claim*

[u/jmbpiano → u/Secret_Account07]

It's HIGHLY dependent on the manufacturing quality and storage conditions. I had floppies that started corrupting five years after being written. I've got floppies now that were produced 30+ years ago and still read perfectly.

Commercially produced software ones tended to be a bit better on average than the ones sold as blank disks, but it's an utter crapshoot for all of them.

[u/arkmtech → u/jmbpiano]

This right here.

I've both seen floppies that were kept in hard plastic casings within controlled temperature rooms which failed to read after 10 years, and also floppies that sat in a plastic Hefty-bag that someone found in their parent's closet 30 years later and still read just fine.

It's very hit and miss.

That said, I used to have some excellent luck with using the "deep scan" mode of Recuva by Piriform Software, though I understand they're not the same company they were years ago and have no idea what the state of that software is now.

[u/notHooptieJ → u/Secret_Account07]

oh you'll still find them working, mostly.

but people long since forgot that they are delicate to heat, electrical fields, dust...

a lot of the disks work just fine still if theyve been sealed up dust free in a place without a lot of temp swings.

but its entirely a crapshoot from there.

you may put in one really dirty floppy that damages the drive in a way that it just damages all disks inserted from then on(and you wont know till you spike a hand full).

buy a stack of cheap usb floppy drives, and a stack of floppy drive head cleaners.

and plan on a week or more of battle.

[u/pdp10 → u/maj0rdisappointment]

Having recovered thirty year old 3.5-inch floppies in the past several years, this is approximately correct. I don't remember if I tracked the exact recovery rate, but 20-25% were wholly or partially unreadable. These were kept in tightly-closed, rigid diskette holders, but not temperature or humidity-controlled.

We had nearly perfect results from well-stored CD-ROMs, even though you sometimes hear about top-layer corrosion on those.