Msg: Re: Floppy disc images

On Wed, Nov 14, 2018 at 1:12 PM J R FOX mailto:jr_fox@xxxxxxxx wrote:

Hi Kari,
My posts were mainly general F.Y.I. in nature. I have a couple of good portable USB 3.5" drives around here, one
of them a slimline, and a 5.25" drive that would have to be mounted inside a computer that would support it. (I've
never seen a portable USB 5.25", and so doubt that they exist -- or ever did ?) Long ago, all or nearly all floppy
discs that I had got copied to Zip disks (remember those ?), and later still aggregated from there over to CD. Your
CD failure is a cautionary tale, as that has been known to happen. Strangely enough, I think those Zip discs --
actually mini-Bernoulli discs, except for one Zip model that was a different sort of HDD -- turn out to be much
hardier than optical discs, floppies, flash media, or even possibly HDD, and could continue working well into
the future, so long as the Zip Drive did. (I think Bernoulli never really makes contact with the media surface, but
rather just hovers over it, which may have something to do with this.) All these technologies come an go, but I
dispose of them rarely and with great reluctance. You never know when you'll need to haul something out of storage.
I'm aware that there are services that do this -- services which btw generally will not touch any copyrighted
material ! -- but I like to be self-sufficient, as much as possible.

Jordan
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On Tue, 11/13/18, Kari Eveli lexitec@xxxxxxxx wrote:

Subject: Re: Floppy disc images
To: xywrite@xxxxxxxx
Date: Tuesday, November 13, 2018, 10:58 PM
Jordan,
It is important to keep the floppy drives if
you still have floppy disks around that
have not been converted to images. However, new USB
3.5" floppy drives are inexpensive (see e.g.
http://www.floppydisk.com/drives;http://www.floppydisk.com/drives) and
could be the solution you need. In many
cases, the many abandonware sites offer images of lost
diskettes that you can use.

I still have a DOS machine
with a dual drive for both 3.5" and 5.25"
floppies. Some time ago, I tried to recover the
manuscript of one of my books from a CD.
That failed, but I had made copies on 5.25" floppies
which were intact.
And if the information you have on your
floppies is really important, you could try
a service that reads them and sends the data back to you
(e.g http://retrofloppy.com/;http://retrofloppy.com/).

Best regards,
Kari Eveli
LEXITEC Book Publishing (Finland)
lexitec@xxxxxxxx
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> However, this was a back in the day sort
of thing: in order to make use of it today one would need
> the floppy disk drive and diskette
media. I expect there must have been other ways to finesse this
> task.
> > Jordan