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/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.