Backing up a large amount of Floppies...What should I do.....

C

cmgray74

All,
I have about 2 large boxes (3.0 Cubic Feet Boxes) of floppies\diskettes
various formats from 360K to 1.44MB Floppies. I have been into IBM PCs
since IBM XTs roamed the earth as the main machines. I have a DVD
burner and I would like to back these all up to DVD Media. I looked at
the backup utility in Windows XP and I have looked at WinImage 8.0.

I like the abilities of WinImage 8.0 especially the mounting and
unmounting of the drive images but I am curious has anyone experienced
any problems with imaging floppies?

What is the most compatible file format I should use going forward?
There is .ima,.vfd, and imz file formats. Are these pretty much
standard Image formats?

Is there any other good utilities?

Thanks for all the help,
Chris
SolomonMan
 
G

Gordon

All,
I have about 2 large boxes (3.0 Cubic Feet Boxes) of floppies\diskettes
various formats from 360K to 1.44MB Floppies. I have been into IBM PCs
since IBM XTs roamed the earth as the main machines. I have a DVD
burner and I would like to back these all up to DVD Media. I looked at
the backup utility in Windows XP and I have looked at WinImage 8.0.

I like the abilities of WinImage 8.0 especially the mounting and
unmounting of the drive images but I am curious has anyone experienced
any problems with imaging floppies?

What is the most compatible file format I should use going forward?
There is .ima,.vfd, and imz file formats. Are these pretty much
standard Image formats?

Is there any other good utilities?

Thanks for all the help,
Chris
SolomonMan
Click to expand...

I would suggest you weed out all the obsolete rubbish first! I expect hardly
anything will run now-a-days, even if XP is able to read the floppy disks!
 
D

Darrell S

I would think the easiest thing is to make a master folder on your hard
drive and copy the floppies to it before trying to then copy them to a CD or
external hard drive. You can edit them on your hard drive and even place
each floppy in a sub-folder if you wish.
 
G

Gordon

Darrell said:
I would think the easiest thing is to make a master folder on your hard
drive and copy the floppies to it before trying to then copy them to a CD
or
external hard drive. You can edit them on your hard drive and even place
each floppy in a sub-folder if you wish.
Click to expand...

I'm guessing that any floppies from Windows 95 and prior will not be read by
XP.
 
D

Darrell S

That's a possibility but he can always try running them in Compatibility
with Win 95. That worked for me with a program that wouldn't run under XP
 
B

Bob I

The diskette is FAT12 so reading/copying isn't an issue. Now the files
themselves may not be so useful as the program that they belong to may
not run in XP.
 
G

Gordon

Darrell said:
That's a possibility but he can always try running them in Compatibility
with Win 95. That worked for me with a program that wouldn't run under XP
Click to expand...

But I think he'll find a large number of the floppies won't even be READ by
XP, never mind running in compatibility mode!
 
G

Gordon

Gordon said:
Does XP read FAT 12 without any tweeking? Not sure it does.
Click to expand...

What I /meant/ to say is, whatever the file format of the floppy, XP will
probably not read any floppy that was made on W95 or previous....that's
been my experience.....
 
C

cmgray74

All,
I plan to back everything up, if possible, to DVD. A few extra DVDs
will not be that big of deal. I expect large amounts not to run on
Windows XP. Be interesting to see what does though. I am doing this for
future reference as I collect classic machines and I am in the emulator
scene so this could be useful for others in the future.

This is where WinImage comes in as it allows you to make images of each
floppy and then store those images in a single file image format. It
also allows you to keep a list of the file contents in a html file.
Then once you have these images created you can mount them to a windows
XP using a virtual drive mount and use them like a floppy or just
recreate the whole original disk using the image restore to a floppy.
This program is available at Downloads.com and is shareware to register
it is just 30 bucks so its very reasonable if it lives up to its
claims.

On the other side, Windows Backup is able to just restore the files and
I could also create a html file with the backup files contents but I
believe I cannot mount the backup as I can in WinImage.

My overall plan of attack is to see what is on each diskette. Once I
know whats on each diskette seperate the personal files into a personal
file area (word,excel,etc documents) then burn them seperate. Then
create a "things that still run in WinXp", and a "things that are being
backuped for future reference for emulators that do not run". Copy all
the images and any html files to my HD and create a ISO (I will burn
the ISO files to DVD as well for further backup or I will just create
another copy of the image files) and then burn a DVD with just the
images that I could mount if need be. I may waste a few DVDs but 1) I
can probably burn close to 4000 Diskettes to one DVD and 2) I will put
the ISO file burns away for catastrophic restore 3) my file images for
the disks will be on DVD and able to be mounted at any time like a
floppy could be just inserted into the drive.

At least I hope this is how it will work, from my initial tests it
appears to work this way.

Any suggestions or ideas,

Thanks,
Chris
SolomonMan



I am doing this "Backup" of
 
C

cmgray74

All,
Diskettes are FAT 12 from my reading.

I do not have to much really old stuff from the XTs anymore, a few
things but not the majority. When the HP Parallel port CD Burners came
out I backed up quite a bit of XT stuff back then. Most stuff is from
Win95 forward.

I will not even mention the CD to DVDs that I will need to do but that
is a whole different project. Two boxes at a time! :)

Thanks,
Chris
SolomonMan
 
G

Guest

XT? OMG !!

I can still hear the 5-1/2" floppy read/write head in my mind ... brrr
brrrrp chuk chuk ... brrr brrrrp chuk chuk. Somebody make it stop!! LOL

good luck with your project.
 
K

Ken Blake, MVP

Gordon said:
What I /meant/ to say is, whatever the file format of the floppy, XP
will probably not read any floppy that was made on W95 or
previous....that's been my experience.....
Click to expand...


Not only Windows 95 or previous, but Windows 98 and Me too.
 
K

Ken Blake, MVP

All,
Diskettes are FAT 12 from my reading.
Click to expand...


Just to clarify this, any disk or partition that is under 16MB in size uses
FAT12, not FAT16 nor FAT32. That includes small hard drive partitions, but
*excludes* very large diskettes, such as LS120 Superdisks (120MB). You don't
see many LS120s around any more, but they were fairly common a few years
ago. I still have a few such diskettes lying around, and even have an LS120
drive somewhere (although it's not installed on any of my current working
computers).
 

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