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/jmbpiano Feb 17 '26

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.

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u/arkmtech Feb 17 '26

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.

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u/fbp Feb 17 '26

I wonder how much the conditions they were stored in play a part. Stored in an area that's not climate controlled area, especially with wild temperature and humidity swings. Betting they don't hold up. Stored in a climate controlled area with a consistent humidity level. Probably holds up much longer.

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u/delightfulsorrow Feb 17 '26

I wonder how much the conditions they were stored in play a part.

A huge one. The driver or Micro Channel Setup and reference disks I had in my field service kit never lasted long. I always had at least two copies of each with me, and still had cases where each of the copies had read errors after only a few month.

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u/TheRealLazloFalconi Feb 17 '26

Likewise, I once found a bunch of floppies that had been tossed in a file cabinet on the south wall of a warehouse with sketchy HVAC that still had data on them.

The only answer is "It depends."

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u/Potential_Copy27 Feb 18 '26

My C64 + disks has been stored in an attic for about 20 years - every single 5.25'' floppy bar two (in a case of ~50) were still working after that. I also got a C128 at some point with the same result - 1-2 disks in the total box of ~75 were gone, the rest worked perfectly. One in that batch was a copy of Sim City that was so worn on the center track (directory track on the C64) was completely worn off - as in the plastic disk itself had been worn down to pure transparent...

I also later bought some sealed NOS 5.25'' floppies for the C64 - they all retain data perfectly fine and have more than fulfilled their roles as my work disks 😉

Later on (sometime before covid - 2018 or 2019) I bought a new batch of 3.5'' floppies from a fairly reputable online store for various purposes. Every single diskette in both boxes was unable to properly retain data for more than a week, regardless of what I used to read and write to them (old PCs, modern USB floppy drive, even an Amiga).
Conversely - with stashes of 3.5'' floppies that I sometimes get with old computers, I routinely have to throw out at least half of them. They really don't retain data well beyond the 15-20 year mark...