RIP: Floppy disks now considered officially dead:(

http://admin-www.mainstreet.com/article/smart-spending/technology/floppy-disks-are-officially-dead?page=2

I still have a collection of them, early norton, ghost, etc., even a win95 I think on a half dozen disks.

This kind of thing is causing problems for archivists, suppose in 100 years an archeologist finds a floppy disk archive of some president or other and there is no floppy drive available any more. The same thing happens to all the other formats, analog data tapes like the early commodore 64 had, other tape formats, then hard drives of a few megabytes or the original ones on a 14 inch platter that held all of a megabyte I think, then 8 inch floppies, then 5 1/4 floppies of various densities, then CD's, then DVD's, then blu-ray, and now thumb drives, and other flash products. Don't forget the early 12 inch movie disks, the first 'DVD'. Where do you find players for that format anymore? It is an archivists nightmare. Then in the audio world, 19th century cylinders, various kinds of 12 to 16 inch 78 RPM records, then 10 inch vinyl, 12 inch mono hifi vinyl, stereo vinyl, 4 channel vinyl, reel to reel tapes, 8 track cassettes, 1/8 inch cassettes, then CD's and now thumb drives and movie DVD with 24 bit audio. Right now I have two 4 track 10 inch reel to reel tapes of an early Southwind recording (my band in Venice Beach, California) but my decks are all dead, so it is a hassle to find somebody to transfer them to digital formats.

What disturbs me more is that modern media has a very short lifetime. Good luck retrieving data from those CD-Rs you burned in 2000.

And then, even if you find ways to read the physical media, you'll likely run into software issues.

I still have some old documents from my macintosh the 80's sitting on my PC hard disk that I have no clue how to read. At some point in the past I moved them from Mac to PC, and kept backing them up and restoring them over time, but along the way lost access.

It's sort of sad, but I've not found the time or energy to find a way to convert them.
Not that I really need those old high school homework documents... or that letter to my old high school flame, but it would be a laugh to read them...

Originally posted by joneschr
What disturbs me more is that modern media has a very short lifetime. Good luck retrieving data from those CD-Rs you burned in 2000.

And then, even if you find ways to read the physical media, you'll likely run into software issues.

I still have some old documents from my macintosh the 80's sitting on my PC hard disk that I have no clue how to read. ...[text shortened]... ments... or that letter to my old high school flame, but it would be a laugh to read them...

They have gone through so many HD formats, fat 16, fat 32, NTSF, and ones for mac's, it is the same archiving problem. There are places you can go if you can spend a kilobuck on a hd that they will extract what is there to extract (not damaged by cracking or some such) but most of us want something a bit cheaper. I have not had much luck with recovery programs. I have a dozen or more HD's from various era's and have not been successful with any of them getting stuff off I want and I used some pretty expensive programs that purported to do just that.

This is definitely a problem, but it can be avoided by keeping backups on multiple storage types (e.g. CD-R and HDD) and backing things up to new formats before the old ones are obsolete.

*edit* And as cloud storage becomes more mainstream, it should make the actual storage medium transparent to the user, so the problem will be reduced further.

Surely, they'll hold on to at least a couple of floppy disk drives.

Originally posted by KazetNagorra
Surely, they'll hold on to at least a couple of floppy disk drives.

I'm sure they will, but how long will they last? What do you do after the last drive dies?
You have to cross archive everything but in a huge library or for instance at NASA where you get gigabytes coming in every hour, they are already backed up getting stuff archived at all, so now what?

Originally posted by sonhouse
They have gone through so many HD formats, fat 16, fat 32, NTSF, and ones for mac's, it is the same archiving problem. There are places you can go if you can spend a kilobuck on a hd that they will extract what is there to extract (not damaged by cracking or some such) but most of us want something a bit cheaper. I have not had much luck with recovery progr ...[text shortened]... ng stuff off I want and I used some pretty expensive programs that purported to do just that.

best to access the corrupt drive with a bootable Linux CD, so nothing is written to your corrupt drive while you're working on it. extract as much as you can of what you want to keep.

better to copy the corrupt drive to a new drive and work on the image on the new drive.

there are tools that work with NTFS drives now. haven't had to use any in a while, though.

even if Windows is too corrupt to run, you can run Linux and copy any files you need off the Windows drive.

http://sourceforge.net/search/?type_of_search=soft&words=hard+drive+recovery

Originally posted by sonhouse
http://admin-www.mainstreet.com/article/smart-spending/technology/floppy-disks-are-officially-dead?page=2

I still have a collection of them, early norton, ghost, etc., even a win95 I think on a half dozen disks.

This kind of thing is causing problems for archivists, suppose in 100 years an archeologist finds a floppy disk archive of some president or ...[text shortened]... ecks are all dead, so it is a hassle to find somebody to transfer them to digital formats.

i'm guessing the problem with a 100-yo floppy is going to be that the magnetisation has randomized, or weakened too much to be read.

back in college we thought we were hot stuff when we got 20 Megabyte hard drives.

up to then it was dual 5-1/4 inch floppies with the O/S on one disk, whatever applications you planned to run on the other disk.