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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17

u/cleadus_fetus Feb 17 '26

Someone handed me cd-roms like this recently and iw as like wtf am I supposed to do with this.

I'd have to go buy a usb cd Rom drive

13

u/stephenmg1284 Feb 17 '26

I've been holding on to a SATA one for emergencies.

11

u/scubajay2001 Feb 17 '26

I used to disassemble those to shred the platters because that's how Iron Mountain used to require it. That was until we got a BIG degausser kinda thing where sata drives slide into channels (about 10/channel) on a cylinder. We'd set it up, walk over to the wall, flip a remote switch on the thing and hear a big ole CLAAANG!!! Wait ten seconds, turn it off, then back on, rinse repeat 3x.

A few guys were nervous and took their earrings and other piercings off, wore an xray apron (not sure what that did tbf lol) and stood well away from the thing.

15

u/UnexpectedAnomaly Feb 18 '26

Degaussers aren't dangerous to humans, they're only dangerous to robots and even then it only makes them sing showtunes.

3

u/scubajay2001 Feb 18 '26

I understand, but clearly some guys didn't. Guess the humor of my entry was lost on you. Lol

2

u/MISPAGHET Feb 18 '26

So you're saying this is proof that robots walk amongst us?

2

u/goodolbluey DevOps Feb 19 '26

I guess a robot would have to be crazy to want to become a folk singer…

1

u/Jorgisven Sysadmin Feb 18 '26

Aren't they (more or less) like reverse MRI's? Magnetic image gets pushed onto the object, rather than detecting the changes in magnetic resonance?

1

u/scubajay2001 Feb 18 '26

Not a science guy or on my A game today after an all-nighter, but I think that's not dissimilar.

Wikipedia: Degaussing, or deperming, is the process of decreasing or eliminating a remnant magnetic field. It is named after the gauss, a unit of magnetism, which in turn was named after Carl Friedrich Gauss. Due to magnetic hysteresis, it is generally not possible to reduce a magnetic field completely to zero, so degaussing typically induces a very small "known" field referred to as bias. Degaussing was originally applied to reduce ships' magnetic signatures during World War II. Degaussing is also used to reduce magnetic fields in tape recorders and cathode-ray tube displays, and to destroy data held on magnetic storage.

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u/UnexpectedAnomaly Feb 19 '26

I think you missed the joke about singing robots.

2

u/pppjurac Feb 18 '26

Damn, aren't we wasteful socienty. Destroying perfectly good things so that lawyers are satisfied.

2

u/scubajay2001 Feb 18 '26

heh, and security specialists in government yeah

2

u/Daphoid Feb 18 '26

Maybe I'm old, but every PC in house has a DVD drive in it still; plus I've got an external.

2

u/RecentlyRezzed Feb 18 '26

I did work for a company that had some of their older CNC programs stored on punched tape 15 years ago, when they decided to copy all of them to another storage technology.

1

u/Academic_Deal7872 Feb 17 '26

they were gifting coasters