Re: Floppy disc images

[J R FOX jr_fox@xxxxxxxxxx]

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


--------------------------------------------
On Tue, 11/13/18, Kari Eveli  wrote:

 Subject: Re: Floppy disc images
 To: xywrite@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
 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) 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/).

 Best regards,

 Kari Eveli
 LEXITEC Book Publishing (Finland)
 lexitec@xxxxxxxxxx

 *** Lexitec Online ***
 Lexitec in English: http://www.lexitec.fi/english.html
 Home page in Finnish: http://www.lexitec.fi/

 > 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