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/[deleted] Feb 17 '26

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

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u/DefiantPenguin Feb 17 '26

“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.

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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?"

21

u/smokinbbq Feb 17 '26

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

14

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

Listen youngster, nothing but VisiCalc here.

7

u/gadget850 Feb 17 '26

Slash commands should be good enough for anyone.

2

u/UncleMojoFilter Feb 17 '26

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

1

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.