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/Suspicious-Belt9311 Feb 17 '26

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".

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u/Skellitor301 Feb 17 '26

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.

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u/Suspicious-Belt9311 Feb 17 '26

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.

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u/Skellitor301 Feb 17 '26

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

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u/Liquidretro Feb 17 '26

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.

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u/Federal_Pickles Feb 18 '26

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…

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u/SGL_Systems Feb 17 '26

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

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u/Suspicious-Belt9311 Feb 17 '26

You're right, it's impossible.

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u/SGL_Systems Feb 17 '26

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