Copy That Floppy – Cambridge guide for preserving data from fragile floppy disks

This guide is written for practitioners wanting to create disk images of floppy disks with the intention of preserving them for the long-term. This guide will focus on 8-inch, 5.25-inch, 3.5-inch and 3-inch floppy disks and will only focus on getting material from these disks and will not cover writing disks. Other resources are available for further information on floppy disks, as outlined in Section 5.

The guide will assume some basic knowledge on some terms, which include digital preservation and assume that you are familiar with tools such as write blockers and feel confident configuring different pieces of software, using different operating systems and the command line. Further resources on digital preservation and other basics can be found in Section 5. This guide will not be a step-by-step demonstration of all the different tools and floppy controllers; this decision was made as the hardware and software around floppy controllers can change quite quickly, but will serve as a basis on how to get started with floppy disks. The focus will be on imaging and preserving the disks, not on extracting files. However, there will be links to further resources on next steps.

The first iteration of this guide was created as part of the project and has multiple sources that feed into it:

A number of workshops and other events over the year (including the )

A round of editing and checking by the community.

This work is a continuation of other guides and resources on floppy disks, in particular and .

A list of all contributors can be found at the end of this guide.

The sections of the guide that will be covered are as follows:

**Identifying your carrier -**This is the first step and will help you understand what type of carrier you have and how to find out more information on it.**Acquiring hardware -**Acquiring hardware compatible with your carrier will depend on the type of carrier that you have, but this will cover the basics that you need to image a floppy disk and also point out some things to keep in mind when acquiring hardware.**Cleaning and maintaining carriers and hardware -**This will cover the basics to keep in mind when using floppy disks drives and will also cover options for damaged, dirty or mouldy floppy disks.**Imaging floppy disks -**This will cover the basic steps of imaging a floppy disk and will explain the difference in creating a flux stream and other steps to consider.**Further steps and where to get help -**This will cover further steps to consider when preserving floppy disks and will also point to other resources for further information.

As a side note, floppies, floppy disk, carriers and disks will be used interchangeably throughout this guide.

1Identifying your carrier¶

The first step in setting up your workflow is to identify your floppy disk. There are a number of resources out there to identify the carriers in your collection, including by UTSA Libraries Special Collections and . As a reminder, this guide will only be covering 8-inch, 5.25-inch, 3.5-inch and 3-inch floppy disks. There are more types of floppy disks out there, as helpfully highlighted by , but these are not covered in this guide.

If you are certain you have one of these types of disks in your collection, the next step would be to find out as much as possible about the floppy disk. This is important, as it can help determine the type of hardware that is needed to ensure the best image is made of the disk. The label on the floppy disk can be very helpful in determining its type. Also, if possible, try to see if there is more information to gather from the depositor or any other source of where this material has come from. It is also worthwhile to consider photographing the carrier at this point, preserving a photograph of the physical floppy disk alongside the disk image can be very helpful at later stages to provide context and a better idea of where the disk image came from.

There are a number of features that can give an indication of what type of floppy disk they might be. In most cases, for the 3.5-inch floppy disks, two holes on the bottom of the disk indicate a high density (HD) disk and one hole a double density (DD) disk. Diagrams of these holes and the layout of 3.5-inch disks can be found , images of these examples can be found further down in this section. Most HD 3.5-inch disks will also include the letters ‘HD’ in the top right corner. For 5.25-inch floppies it can be harder to distinguish, sometimes there is a white/black/gold hub ring around the centre hole of the floppy disks that are DD, but this is not always the case. There is also the possibility of a hard sectored floppy disk; these will have . There is a single notch on 5.25-inch floppy disks, but sometimes you will find a second notch; this is a ‘flippy’ disk and will be discussed further below. Hard sectored floppy disks can only be 8-inch or 5.25-inch in size.

It’s also important to recognise that the types of floppy disks encountered can vary significantly depending on geography and market conditions of the time. There was a wide variety of systems, and therefore, floppy disk formats in use during the 1970/1980s. Before the dominance of IBM, which was first accomplished by the company in North America , many different standards and systems could be found on the market. Systems such as Kaypro, Osborn, Commodore and Apple were popular in the US, whilst systems such as the Amstrad CPC and PCW, Atari and Amiga were popular . Similarly, in France, machines like the Thomson MO series and Minitel terminals contributed to a diversity of disk types. In Australia systems such as the local MicroBee and Exidy Sorcerer were popular for 5.25-inch disks.

In Japan and parts of Asia, due to the need for encoding character sets beyond the Latin alphabet. Japanese PCs such as NEC’s PC-98 line required disk formats that could handle Kanji and Katakana characters, leading to region-specific variations. Do keep this in mind when analysing your collection. Regional differences will be present and will affect the hardware and possible software needed to image and analyse disks.

The labels of floppy disks are able to highlight a number of things:

**How many sides the disk was certified to use.**Early disks are often labeled as SS (single-sided) or DS (double-sided). While the physical media on most disks is capable of holding data on both sides, a single-sided designation indicates that only one side has been tested and certified by the manufacturer. DS disks effectively doubled the capacity and could be used in drives that supported flipping (as can be seen with 3-inch Amstrad disks) or writing on both surfaces.**The method of encoding data on (‘density’ of) the disk.**Floppy disks evolved through different data encoding methods, and improvements in drive technology, each increasing the amount of data that could be stored. SD (Single Density) disks used FM (Frequency Modulation) encoding and were among the earliest formats. This was followed by DD (double density), which employed MFM (Modified Frequency Modulation) encoding and roughly doubled the capacity. At the same time some systems used Group Coded Recording (GCR), derived from a system first used on magnetic tapes. Later, as drive technology improved, MFM encoded HD (high density) disks featuring improved magnetic coatings that could store 1.2MB (5.25-inch) or 1.44MB (3.5-inch). Very rarely, ED (extra high density) disks appeared, capable of 2.88MB on 3.5-inch floppies. These labels not only showcase the expected capacity on the disks, but also serve as guidance for drive compatibility. This will be discussed in more detail in the next section.**Operating system or formatting type.**For instance, a disk might be labeled ‘DOS’ to indicate it had been formatted for IBM PC-compatible systems running MS-DOS. Others might carry labels for Macintosh (HFS), CP/M, or other environments.

It should be noted that labels can be misleading. F