A Warning About Old Floppy Disks...

[SS]

 

I made exact copies of the disks using two drives with "MYCOPIER' after releasing the SIO drive . I never put them on a hard drive.

David

I am confused. You made copies using two physical drives and physical floppy disks? Or you used the SIO2PC to copy a physical disk onto a virtual drive on the PC?

[DavidMil]

After thinking about what I did, I see the confusion (caused by me as usual). All I really did was use the SIO2USB device

to load MYCOPIER via APE. Then I just copied disks to other disks with the sector copier. And that is why I am asking

how do I copy entire disks to my hard drive?

 

Sorry for the poor communication skills,

David

[SS]

Set your physical drive to D1 and plug your SIO2USB into it and into the PC. Open APE and leave D1 on it empty and load a blank ATR into the D2 slot. Load DOS or your sector copier onto the Atari and then you should be able to copy a floppy disk in your physical D1 to the ATR in APE's D2. Then you can give the ATR any name that you like and save it to a file on your PC.

 

.

Edited December 31, 2018 by SS

[ACML]

 

I have a whole bunch of ammunition that is 50 years old. Not even stored in an ammo can, it still works. Old paper shells, .22LR, all of it. One .22LR box still has the price tag on it - $.45 or some such.

 

Bob

Bob,

Off the topic, but I agree. In California were the air is almost always dry, ammo can last for decades without ill effect. When I lived in Lancaster, CA, I shot a lot of old WWII surplus M2 ball (150 grain FMJ 30-06) and they were 100% reliable. The military uses sealer on the primer and the cannelure (moisture can't get to the primer or powder). Like the man said, "keep your powder dry and the world will turn". I remember a song with a verse "there aren't many things a man can't fix with $700 and a 30-06".

Edited December 31, 2018 by ACML

[+slx]

Finally backing up my old Atari floppies is a good resolution for 2019! More important than buying yet another gadget even.

 

Once on the Mac they‘d be protected by my normal backup schedule which relies on multiple Time Machine backups, some of them local, some of them on a portable disc that goes into a safebox and some of them on a NAS in a different fire section of the building, most backups on mirrored or RAID drives. So I guess I‘ll lose my data in an earthquake or flood....;-( Backing up over the web seemed too expensive so far, at least for Terabytes of (unsorted) pics and videos.

 

 

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[gozar]

Finally backing up my old Atari floppies is a good resolution for 2019! More important than buying yet another gadget even.

 

Once on the Mac they‘d be protected by my normal backup schedule which relies on multiple Time Machine backups, some of them local, some of them on a portable disc that goes into a safebox and some of them on a NAS in a different fire section of the building, most backups on mirrored or RAID drives. So I guess I‘ll lose my data in an earthquake or flood....;-( Backing up over the web seemed too expensive so far, at least for Terabytes of (unsorted) pics and videos.

 

 

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I've been playing around with Backblaze's B2 cloud storage. $.005 per gigabyte a month, 3 terabytes would be $15 a month for storage. That's a small price to pay for the piece of mind. The downside is that it would take me forever to upload 3 terabytes at 5Mbps. :-)

[+Nezgar]

A single Office 365 Business Essentials license 'officially' gave you 1TB of OneDrive storage for $5.00 USD ($6.40 Canadian) per month, but they're recently quietly trickling down some upgrades from their enterprise plans, so you can already manually increase your quota to 5TB now, implying that this will be the new default for the plan in the near future.

 

so 5TB for $5/mo seems to be a smokin deal right now compared to:

- Backblaze ($0.004 per GB / Month - 5TB = $25/mo)

- Amazon Glacier ($0.004 per GB / Month - 5TB = $20.48/mo)

- Dropbox $9.99 for 1TB, equiv to $50/mo for 5TB

 

My Synology NAS supports doing a nightly sync of selected folders to any of these, so I'm protected if more than 1 drive dies at once, or the house burns down... I used to use Glacier, which worked just fine, but OneDrive also adds convenience of direct file access to the replicated files online using a browser. Glacier makes you wait up to 4 hours to get your data, and you have to use apps that support their proprietary API...

[eegad]

I've actually been shocked by the longevity of my own disks. Most of the time I play games on my 800xl via Maxflash carts, so I only very occasionally hook up my 1050s and mess around with real disks. But so far, anytime I do dig out the disks, they all work just fine. Then again, my disks were never stored in hot attics or damp basements. They've always just been in closets at regular room temperature.

[tep392]

So do SD cards, CF cards, USB-sticks and other flashmedia. A8 floppy disks are nowadays up to 40 years old and unbelievable, but true, many of them still work! Will ask you again in december 2058 if your SD cards (and other flashmedia) from december 2018 still work... (I don't think so, Tim)

 

I have a 1 year old 64GB SD card in my phone that just failed!

[+DrVenkman]

I have a 1 year old 64GB SD card in my phone that just failed!

 

I bought a 32GB microSD card for one of my RPi boxes a couple months that was DOA. It appeared to format fine at first, by my Pi was crashing after an hour or two. Then after the second or third attempt to format and re-write the Raspian image Etcher said it had encountered too many errors and aborted. Bah.

[R.Cade]

 

I bought a 32GB microSD card for one of my RPi boxes a couple months that was DOA. It appeared to format fine at first, by my Pi was crashing after an hour or two. Then after the second or third attempt to format and re-write the Raspian image Etcher said it had encountered too many errors and aborted. Bah.

There is a lot of fake and junk media out there... and it's difficult to identify the fakes.

[tep392]

There is a lot of fake and junk media out there... and it's difficult to identify the fakes.

I bought my 64gb card in best buy. Hope they dont stock fakes.

[newtmonkey]

I've been impressed by disk reliability also. I irresponsibly bought a "not tested" Apple IIc on Ebay a few years ago, and it not only worked perfectly, but the floppies it originally came with also worked perfectly.

 

I've heard that floppies manufactured later on were less reliable, but who knows. I bought a bunch of new old stock floppies for my older computers and I had no problem at all with the 5.25" disks, but about half of the Sony 3.5" disks were bad straight from the box.

[Mclaneinc]

multiple T's of stuff???

 

I presume that is all the Atari family rather than 8 bit as I have what I think is a lot (114G) but that's dwarfed by yours BUT I basically collect Atari 8bit ONLY with an ST gamebase...

 

Six, have you been hoovering the internet!

 

Clouding that would indeed be fun because even with compacted archives rather than loose folders many of the files will be so small the speed never works for them and unless you bundled them into a bigger archive for the upload speed to max out it still would take forever...

 

(Can't be bothered to pick an internet speed and formulate the time)

 

The only additional thing with this is that having CLOUD storage etc is really positive BUT unless there's access to it for archiving folks its still basically locked away in the basement...Proper archivers would ask what is personal, what you don't want archived and work with you and anyone else to retain this great archive for the future...

 

There you have it, my Independence Day cheap speech...(Gunstar will know what I mean )

 

God I hate my habit of bracketing stuff that has a smiley and going back to what roots I have coding and closing out all the brackets...Can't help myself, it just seems right

 

I was told the actual name for it by FJC I think...Can't remember....

[Guest]

There you have it, my Independence Day cheap speech...(Gunstar will know what I mean )

 

God I hate my habit of bracketing stuff that has a smiley and going back to what roots I have coding and closing out all the brackets...Can't help myself, it just seems right

 

I was told the actual name for it by FJC I think...Can't remember....

 

 

think the type you've used:

( ) are called parentheses (sis, singular)

[ ] are called crotchets or brackets

{ } are called braces

< > are called chevrons (not to be confused with less/greater than symbol - which is narrower)

 

i'm not 100% sure but they may be called enclosures in coding terms -

[+Gemintronic]

Back in the day there were recovery and repair utilities that claimed to re-magnetize the media. Stuff like HDAT2, HDD Regenerator, Victoria, etc..

 

There was one in particular that was great for floppies. Of course, that's the one I forgot the name of

 

I wonder if using such a utility would restore disks to the point they could be re-formatted and used again.

[Tezz]

I've decided to build a Kryoflux to get to grips with backing up/imaging everything up this year. I have thousands upon thousands of floppies stored away from all the years of use with the A8, ST, Amiga and Akai sampler. There's also cassettes with the Sinclair stuff to deal with later. Many of the disks with our sourcecode for the games/demos and other projects have not been backed up or seen the light of day for a very long time so it will be interesting to explore them and see what's worth posting here too.

Edited January 12, 2019 by Tezz

[+bob1200xl]

I think a few things ought to be cleared up about floppy disks. David sent me his disks (thank you, David) and I took a look at them.

 

Three of them were 1.2meg - usually identified by no hub ring and black media, not dark brown. No way you can use them in an Atari.

 

The other disks could be divided between two types: clean and trashed. By trashed, I mean spots, scratches or dents in the media, Look very closely under strong lighting for an even and smooth recording surface. All the nice looking disks could be formatted with no errors. None of the ugly ones could. (disks written on drives that are out of alignment or off-speed can be used by just formatting them - on a good drive, please)

 

It was obvious that we need to differentiate between an old, unused disk and one that has a lot of miles on it. In general, old, disks with no surface abnormalities should work just fine,

 

Nobody is claiming a disk will run forever. They will just plain wear out eventually. They use contact recording, which means that the head touches the media. It doesn't 'fly' like an HDD.

 

I cleaned my 1050 head when I was done. No oxide was evident.

 

Other than ICD disks, I don't think a 30 year old disk deteriorates much over time. I have thousands of them and they seem to work just fine, but they are subject to wear and tear.

 

Bob

[ijor]

It was obvious that we need to differentiate between an old, unused disk and one that has a lot of miles on it. In general, old, disks with no surface abnormalities should work just fine,

...

Other than ICD disks, I don't think a 30 year old disk deteriorates much over time. I have thousands of them and they seem to work just fine, but they are subject to wear and tear.

 

Many ICD disks have surface problems, but certainly they are not the worst. I suspect that your thousands of disks is not a representative sample of the original disks recorded. How many original Synapse disks from the "golden era" do you have? Titles like Zeppelin or Blue Max (not Blue Max 2001) are probably among the worst. Many Avalon Hill titles are also very sensitive.

 

Non original disks have a different statistic.

Edited January 27, 2019 by ijor

[+bob1200xl]

I found about 30 loose OEM Synapse disks, half of them are 'golden era'. Most of these old Synapse disks are indeed, bad. Add Synapse to the list of marginal media.

 

I tried Lode Runner, and Caverns of Mars - OK...

 

I have about 1000 OEM disks. I would expect that most of them are OK. I also have 3000 non-OEM disks. I would expect that almost all of them are OK. I use 100 of them on a regular basis with no problem at all.

 

So, yes, non-original disks do have a different statistic. For sure.

 

Only a couple of the disks that David sent me are OEM.

 

Bob

[+Larry]

I've been archiving my original disks, and I've found about 5 bad disks out of at least 100. In every case, the culprit was 3M. I think someone else mentioned 3M. These all had spots/blooming. Otoh, I have more 3M disks than any other brand.

[DavidMil]

Thanks for your time Bob1200XL.

 

David

[ijor]

I have about 1000 OEM disks. I would expect that most of them are OK. I also have 3000 non-OEM disks. I would expect that almost all of them are OK. I use 100 of them on a regular basis with no problem at all.

So, yes, non-original disks do have a different statistic. For sure.

I think 5.25 media, especially DD (not HD) is much more reliable than 3.5 disks in every sense. I agree with you that you rarely need to discard 5.25 disks. OTOH, I have plenty of 3.5 disks that you can't format anymore.

 

I've been archiving my original disks, and I've found about 5 bad disks out of at least 100. In every case, the culprit was 3M. I think someone else mentioned 3M. These all had spots/blooming. Otoh, I have more 3M disks than any other brand.

Not sure I understand. Original disks 3M branded?