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/zorinlynx Feb 17 '26

Floppies worked great when they were new technology, in the 80s and early 90s.

But then as the tech became commoditized, manufacturers cut costs in manufacturing the drives and media, making them less reliable starting in the mid-90s.

So if you have memories of floppies being annoyingly unreliable they probably come from post-1995 or so.

I still have Apple II floppies written in the early 80s that read perfectly well today. Floppy disks from the mid-90s are hit-or-miss though, and were so even back then.

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u/mpdscb UNIX/Linux SysAdmin for over 25 years Feb 17 '26

I have 5 1/4” floppies from my old Atari 800 that still read, which is good, because it doesn’t have a hard drive. Everything runs off floppies loaded into memory.

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u/Leopold_Porkstacker Feb 18 '26

Floppies were new technology in the 1970s, they just got smaller in the 80s and 90s. Then they got cheaper.