The archivist preserving decaying floppy disks | Hacker News Reader

The archivist preserving decaying floppy disks

popsci.com

88 pointsBrajeshwar21 comments

This got me playing with an old 3.5" USB Diskette Drive I got from work on NetBSD. It works great. All I need is one of those for 5.25 diskettes :)

A long time ago I had to get a file off of a 3.5" diskette that was corrupted. Linux would panic but NetBSD just came out with the rump kernel. So I installed NetBSD and used rump. Rump crashed a few times but the system stayed up. So after a few tries I got about 80 - 90% of the document.

I miss the convenience and cheapness of diskettes.

Vaguely-related: With an OTG adapter (eg USB C to A), a person can plug a USB floppy drive into their pocket supercomputer.

A single disk won't even hold a single photo from the device's many-megapixel camera, but it works fine -- Android, Apple, whatever.

It is approximately the funniest fucking thing ever to have a floppy drive whir to life while connected only to a smartphone, and I strongly suggest to anyone with the means to make the time to experience it.

Some previous coverage:

Oct 2025 The people rescuing forgotten knowledge trapped on old floppy disks

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45545017

Off topic, but do anyone else remember how a box of new 3.5 inch floppy disks smelled? That smell appeared to have disappeared from the world.

I wonder, what happened to it. Do anyone else feel the same?

I remember the smell being mostly that of of acrylic adhesive labels that had been outgassing inside of a sealed up box for some time. I recall this as being somewhat akin to the smell of Scotch tape of that period.

I remember more fondly the sweet smell of new empty DVDs. What Was up with that, why was it so sweet smelling?

Even computers smelled a certain way, and computer labs smelled like skynet!

I just opened and checked. No distinguishing smell.

Data decays on floppies at rest but... If I manage to read say a 5"1/4 floppy from my Commodore 64 correctly and copy it to another, NIUB (New In Unopened Box) but 30 years old floppy, will that new copy last for decades again?

Or is the medium itself damaged by time passing?

I'm asking because during Covid I dug out my old Commodore 64 and managed to read a few disks and created a copy of some that were still working.

It's a bit of both, but I think the bigger issue (at least in my experience) is the magnetic flux pattern, especially if you've got new-old-stock media that hasn't been written to much or physically damaged. If you successfully remaster the old floppy to a new one in good condition, you ought to get a good many years out of the new disk. Of course, it would also be a good time to image that floppy and store it somewhere else.

On the other hand, there are many good disk drive emulators for the Commodore 64 now and these can be had for fairly cheaply (like a SD2IEC with a Epyx FastLoad combination), which will avoid the whole problem. I still use floppies with my 128, but I also push disk images and programs to it with a 1541-Ultimate.

Thank you very much for the explanation!

Brought a dozen or so floppies I had to a vintage computer festival last year and handed them off to someone who would archive them.

As I worked in a university computer lab briefly in the late 1980's, I had "captured" a few early Macintosh viruses on a couple of floppies. The recipient of my floppy collection seemed delighted by that, ha ha.

I got a gift of a box of 3.5 Floppies about 10+ years ago. Dug up recently, and given each to my daughter and her neighbor friends, “Here is the SAVE icon. Keep it with you.”

I also remembered and completed the meme with a magnet stuck to the fridge.

https://xcancel.com/brajeshwar/status/2024862389850734912

Along with the handwriting that does not make it clear that the word is "Disk".

Is there some kind of "magnetic microscope. Something with a head that detects magnetism, that could be made to scan (vary closely ) the surface of the floppy with out actuallyTOUCHING the surface. This data could then be decoded to the actual data. It would be a "long winded" and require lots processing , but it would avoid wearing the floppy out....?

Magnetic Force Microscopy is a known data recovery technique and the originating technology of the various aggressive disk wiping programs.

This is exactly what magnetic flux imaging does, it just uses a regular floppy mechanism with all the risk that entails.

If one built a more sensitive head mechanism that floats above the disk, one could (say) load a disk sans envelope/case and take a flux image of it without anything touching the surface.

Then one could use the existing flux processing software (possibly tweaking it) to extract the data.

Please let floppy disks die already. It was an absolute embarrassment of a technology. Hugely unreliable, fragile, offering a ridiculously small storage space. The only benefit it provided was ability to write data before flash drives and internet become widely available. Let it rest in pieces.

I used them a lot in the 80s and 90s and I don't ever recall losing data. Over the course of time, they will degrade, but I'm pretty sure a disk can last ten years.

The last 5.25" floppies I managed to read had about 30 years. They were kept in thick plastic sleeves sold by Acornsoft.

> It was an absolute embarrassment of a technology.

They seem tiny now, but floppies were huge back then because they gave regular people a simple way to save and move files. Writing them off today ignores how much they pushed personal computing forward.

The only thing cheaper were cassette tapes. Those were indeed unreliable, awfully slow, and couldn't store much data (but you probably already had a cassette player, so it was dirt cheap).

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