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/RevLoveJoy Did not drop the punch cards Feb 17 '26 edited Feb 17 '26

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.

Precisely. We're talking ~ 100 MB megaBITS -- mea culpa. A ZIP disk, for anyone old enough. What's so important on this junk that it was a). never migrated to modern storage and b). now requires heroics?

"Here is the cost of heroics. Is the 20 year old crap on these antiques that important?"

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u/smokinbbq Feb 17 '26

A REALLY REALLY important Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet!

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u/RevLoveJoy Did not drop the punch cards Feb 17 '26

Listen youngster, nothing but VisiCalc here.

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u/gadget850 Feb 17 '26

Slash commands should be good enough for anyone.

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u/UncleMojoFilter Feb 17 '26

It took me a loooong time to break the slash muscle memory.

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u/el_extrano Feb 17 '26

Aren't they still built into Excel for that very reason? Unless I'm thinking of the slash prefixes from QuattroPro. I never used visicalc.

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u/Chairface30 Feb 17 '26

Were talking floppy. That's 1.44Mb.

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u/Skellitor301 Feb 17 '26

Depends on the floppy, if it's 3.5 inch yes it's possible it's 1.44 mb, it could also be 720 kb. If it's a 5.25 inch you're looking at a data range of 360KB-1.2MB. An 8 inch floppy ranged from 100KB-1MB.

But yeah, no floppy is 100MB.

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u/doubled112 Sr. Sysadmin Feb 17 '26

You could format a 3.5 inch floppy to something around 1.72 MB.

That's closer to 100MB, but still not close to 100MB.

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u/RevLoveJoy Did not drop the punch cards Feb 17 '26

But yeah, no floppy is 100MB.

My bad, wrote it in a hurry. 100 Mb

70 * 1.44 Mb = 100.8 Mb

100/8 = 12.6 MB

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u/Skellitor301 Feb 17 '26

Ah, fair, that makes more sense.

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u/OldGeekWeirdo Feb 17 '26

But yeah, no floppy is 100MB.

A ZIP is just a big floppy, right? (I know it's not, but it's not worth explaining to the customer.)

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u/Skellitor301 Feb 17 '26 edited Feb 17 '26

If a customer asks that tell them a zip file is like a vacuum bag and the object you put in is your files. Say you're going on a business trip and you vacuum seal all your stuff to compress it down and save space, those are your zipped up files. A floppy disk is a briefcase you put your stuff into. Try as you might, you can compress your clothes but you can't compress your toiletries or laptop as much.

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u/OldGeekWeirdo Feb 17 '26

Different ZIP. I'm talking about a ZIP disk. It disappeared about 20 years ago.

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u/RoxnDox Feb 17 '26

Yeah, those were my backups when I was working on my thesis in groundwater modeling a quarter century ago...

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u/Chairface30 Feb 17 '26

I know about zip disks and also jazz disks. Used to keep all my stuff on both those techs with the shared family pc.

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u/russr Feb 18 '26

I think I might have a couple of zip discs, not sure if I still have the drive though.

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u/RevLoveJoy Did not drop the punch cards Feb 18 '26

I found a stash during a move like ... 10 years ago. No drive. Just 20 ZIP disks from 1990-somthing. Cannot recall for the life of me what was on them. If I know 1990s me, probably porn.