Best way to back up floppies to modern systems?

[Starman]

Hi all,

I have boxes and boxes of A800 floppies. Some are mine from back in the day, some I got from the Trenton Computer Festival around 10 years ago. They've been stored well and work fine. The thing is, they're not going to last forever in this state. I need to know the best system for backing these things up.

 

Do I:

 

1) Find a connection between a PC/Mac and the A 810?

2) Use the A 800 to pump the data through to the PC/Mac?

 

What I'd like to see is some way of mounting the floppy onto a PC/Mac, and drag and drop the contents of the floppy to a folder.

 

Then the next question is - can I hook up a hard drive to an A 800?

 

Mike

[ijor]

The "best" way depends on the hardware you have and how the disks are formatted.

 

Most people use a SIO2PC cable that connects the A8 to the PC through the serial port. Or a 1050-2PC cable that connects the drive directly to the PC. The cables are easy to build by yourself or can be bought for a very reasonable price.

 

The advantadge of this method is that you can read any disk. The minus is that is somewhat slow compated to other methods.

 

If you have a PC 5.25 drive you can read "some" disks directly on your PC, which is way much faster than using a SIO2PC or 1050-2-PC cable. With software that is widely available, you can normally read double or enhanced density disks, either single or double sided. But you normally can't read the flippy side, it depends on exactly which 5.25 drive you have. Reading single density disks is much more complicated, some PCs can others cannot.

 

If in addition to the PC 5.25 drive, you have a Catweasel or a Copy II PC Option Board; then the single density issue is solved. The flippy side is not because it depends on the drive, not on the controller.

[danwinslow]

Yes, you can hook up a hard drive to an 8 bit. There is MyIDE, SIO2IDE, and the black box and MIO interfaces, just to name a few. You can also get prosystem from atarimax and hook up a 1050 to your pc and copy literally anything, including copy protected disks.