Semi - Off Topic: Backing up a large amount of Floppies...What should I do.....

[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?

Are there any other good utilities out there for this kind of job?

Thanks for all the help,
Chris
SolomonMan

 

[Mike T.]

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.

Your best backup solution is a match. Maybe a little lighter fluid, also.

Seriously though, there should be no need to image the floppies, unless they
are bootable to some really bizarre OS that nobody has ever heard of. (but
then, why would you feel the need to back them up?) CDR media can be made
bootable. DVDR media can be made bootable. So if you need to save the
information on the floppies, just create a folder for each one on a hard
drive, under another folder, such as "c:\floppies\". When you are done
copying all the information (months later), just burn the whole directory to
2 or 3 different CDRs (for redundancy, make more than one copy). I doubt if
you will have enough information to fill even a single CDR disk, so why
bother wasting DVD media?

If you are worried about using them AS IS (such as having programs that only
work on a certain OS, that the floppy loads at boot), don't be. See
www.bootdisk.com (there will always be a free online source for these
older floppies, bootdisk.com is a good one)

-Dave

 

[johns]

Same here. I recommend adding a little gasoline to the matches.

If you've been doing this sort of thing, you are no doubt the type
who never ran an anti-virus, and those floppies are just
crawling with the oldie-moldies like the Israeli Virus .. and
even better .. which will just delete your hard drive.

johns

 

[cmgray74]

All,

The gasoline and matches may be the best thing.....We will see.....

I am not overly worried about the virus possibility as all my machines
besides having latest virus protection signatures are also all imaged
and burned to CD.

Heck, with some of these diskettes, anti-virus was just in its infancy.


I trying to remember when the first Antivirus came out that I got. I
know mine was a early copy of Central Point Antivirus on 5 1/4 floppy
(1989-1990?). Most of these diskettes I am doing are about 1988-89
forward with most in the Windows 95/98 era.

The images are to allow some of my owned purchased software, some of
which are bootables, to be recreated in its exact format. Also the
application allows batch images. So I can do things like do the next
ten diskettes and it will prompt me to feed the floppy drives while it
creates the images which I think will be a little faster then putting
the diskettes in to the drive, copy the items to a temp directory,
master/layout the DVD and then finally burn. This will be especially
useful on large application that used to come on 10 or more Diskettes.
I will dedicate one of my machines to this process until its finished
not occupying/bothering my main machine. This will keep every diskette
to a single file format that can be read/moved with ease in the future
and accessed as easy as the original. In either case I will still have
to master the CD/DVD but it will be fewer files that I will have to
deal with.

I am going to play some tonight and see how things go.

Thanks,
Chris
SolomonMan

 

[Don Taylor]

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 don't believe the native backup utility in XP will toast DVD's.
You should check to make sure but I think it is limited to CD's.

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?

One bit of personal experience, on an irregular basis I toast a CD
of all the thousands of documents I have written in the last few
years. Most of those files are relatively small. But the native
XP CD toasting looks at the size of the empty CD and the smallest
allocation it makes for each file is huge by comparison. It will
fill about 600 megabytes of the CD. But if I zip the files into
a single file before I do that it takes about 70 megabytes, if I
remember correctly, and much of that savings is not the compression,
it is the size of the blocks allocated by XP when toasting the CD.

But that is not creating an image of a drive, although you might
run into similar problems.

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?

 

[cmgray74]

All,
I did about 12 diskettes last night in a little over 50 minutes. Each
Disk takes about 3 minutes or so to read. So reading the disk is the
biggest hangup. In some cases I copied the software to my drive
directly and then injected it into the image, as this is faster then
the tool just trying to make a exact copy of the whole diskette. This
injection method is faster as many of my diskettes are composed of zip
files from BBS boards or shareware Companies and do not completely fill
the diskette. Data integrity is running about 80% or so. Meaning about
80% of the data is recoverable/readable. You can really see where
buying good disks ($$$), in some cases, paid off . My Copyrighted
software, as well as the zip shareware files, seem to work as a mounted
diskette as good as the originals.

Believe it or not I had only one piece of software, out of the 80% that
was readable, not run at all. Most actually ran fine and I ran an old
Spiderman game from 1991 just fine. Also Prince of Persia came up and
ran just fine to. I had one piece of software that ran like it was on
adrenalin but it ran fine other then that.

The WinImage delivered everything it claims and I plan on registering
this software on my next pay day. I am software engineer so I support
my industry

The only thing I see as a negative so far on this project is the time
its going to take and floppy data integrity. Once the project is done
though I will have more room in my office and a small easily accessible
DVD\CD with many of my old favorites!

Thanks for the help and suggestions,
Chris
SolomonMan

 

[Charlie Wilkes]

The WinImage delivered everything it claims and I plan on registering
this software on my next pay day. I am software engineer so I support
my industry

I admire you greatly. That is same kind of selfless commitment that
provides beta testers for Vista.

I'm not in the industry, so I only pay for software as a last resort,
and this one doesn't even come close. Here is a rundown on some other
options:

http://www.fdos.org/ripcord/rawrite/

I did the same thing with some old floppies. I can't remember what I
used, but it was in DOS.

Charlie

 

[John Holmes]

"contributed" in alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt:

I am software engineer

You should be fired on the spot, you ****ing dumb **** asking for a simple
backup task.

 

[Charlie Wilkes]

"contributed" in alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt:


You should be fired on the spot, you ****ing dumb **** asking for a simple
backup task.

Hey, I know this guy... the same one who blasted me for experimenting
with my locked video card.

You should write your memoirs, pal. "Stuck in the Back Office at the
Sewage Plant: A Life."

Charlie

 

[cmgray74]

All,
One more thing I found out from my doing this on multiple machines at
once. I used a new USB external 3.5 drive and its way faster and the
drive readability I think may have gone up as well.

Also I learned on the old floppies if you can't read a file\track then
to pull the diskette out and rotate the media with a pen\pencil and put
it back in. This seemed to increase the readability of the diskette as
well. I have read close to 50 diskettes already in about 3 hours on one
machine. I hope the multiple machine on a KVM idea will decrease the
overall time of this project.

Also is there any external USB 5.25 1.2 MB drives out there?

Thanks for all the help,
Chris

 

[John Holmes]

Charlie Wilkes "contributed" in alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt:

Hey, I know this guy... the same one who blasted me for experimenting
with my locked video card.

Stop ****ing around with things you know shit about.

You should write your memoirs, pal. "Stuck in the Back Office at the
Sewage Plant: A Life."

PMSL!

Charlie

You /are/ a girl, now aren't you?