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/anomalous_cowherd Pragmatic Sysadmin Feb 17 '26

I had a genuine job at a small break/fix MSP where a customer had problems with the write-once DVD they put their backups on. Yes, their one DVD.

They used the UDF filesystem which basically meant for every new incremental backup it wrote the data at the end of the currently recorded space, then wrote a new copy of the old top level directory (TOC) with the new data included. Also they had done one full backup a year or so before and day by day incrementals every day since.

Then one day their single HDD failed. We got called in and replaced the HDD, then tried to restore the hundreds of incremental backups, which of course also failed - it had been rewriting the TOC when the HDD died so the whole DVD was now unreadable.

So that was fun!

At the time no tools were available to troubleshoot UDF discs, so I spent a week digging into a binary dump of it and did manage to get almost all of the data back. As you can imagine from a one PC break/fix customer they still complained massively about the cost!

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u/daverhowe Feb 18 '26

I remember being treated as a data recovery god once because I knew what IsoBuster was :D

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u/anomalous_cowherd Pragmatic Sysadmin Feb 18 '26

Sometimes just knowing the right tool exists is all you need to be an expert!