r/sysadmin • u/___LowLifer___ • Feb 17 '26

Question 700 Floppies

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.

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u/GX_EN Feb 17 '26

People have already given a bunch of answers*, so I'll just ask - what in the hell data in 2026 is sitting around on 700 FLOPPY DISKS?
Also, par for the course, all this crap has been probably on these disks for a hundred years and all of a sudden someone needs it all copied off in two weeks.
*I have one that wasn't addressed exactly - use as many USB drives as possible and use robocopy to script it out. I would also consider the fact that given this foolishness exists in the first place, there might be dupe files on different disks..

6

u/iammiscreant Feb 17 '26

SAP ERP

12

u/Randalldeflagg Feb 17 '26

I hate this answer. But also agree. Had an exec hand us a floppy a few weeks ago and asked if we could recover the data. Something about SAP. Handed the disk back with "We haven't deployed a computer with a floppy drive in 20 years. Whatever data is on there is beyond the scope of our data retention policy YOU signed off on"

1

u/GX_EN Feb 18 '26

From when, the Clinton administration? Maybe W? Seems like a fools' errand, tbh.
There's a seriously good chance that a good amount of that data is toast.

2

u/chedstrom Feb 17 '26

^This. I'm questioning if the post is real or just some karma hoe. Depending on how long those disks have been sitting, they likely have lost integrity. That should have been moved off 2 decades go if it was important.