Advice for checking a few hundred ST & A8 disks

[KLund1]

Over the years of buying and selling my favorite computer brand,  I seen to have accumulated several hundred 3.5" ST disks and about the same for 5.25" A8's.

Sometime early next year, I was thinking of going through all of them to see what possibly interesting things might be on them. Most have the handwritten labels. Many have nothing on the label, or no label. And there is a lot of official labeled game and application disks.

I have been keeping them in a cool dry place, but who knows how they were stored before they got to me.

My plan was to have an external drive connected to an ST with a USD, but have it uncased so I can clean the heads often. I would keep reading disks until I got to one I could not read then clean the heads and try again. If it still will not read, put in unreadable pile for later checking with a disk editor.  Similar process for the A8, but use SIO2SD to save files.

Next thing to think about is all the duplicate files I'll find.

Is this file a slightly modified version of this game because its file size is not the same as the other 3 I found before? Or are the first 3 were modified and I now have the 'regular' version. How to save the same file name several times that have different file sizes?

The collections of disks come from possible past Atari employees, local collectors, 3rd party employees, kid programmers, etc. I do not want to miss something that could be valuable to our community. 

Thoughts, suggestions, ideas?

Thanks

 

[ParanoidLittleMan]

It's good to do it with Atari, equipped with mass storage. There are some special formats what PC floppy controller can not read well. Not to mention USB floppy drives - for Atari formats mostly useless.

" And there is a lot of official labeled game and application disks. " - that means copy protections, I guess. So, you will need pasti for them.

 

Same file name you can save in different directories. With benefit that can name those dirs like FLO1, FLO2, VER1 .. VERN, or whatever what may give some clue.

And even if files have same name and length, must be not same content. I use a lot function 'Compare by content' of Total Commander.

Surely, different length may be because different version, revision, development version. Or just some data base file, with different content.

Comparing files can help in finding version numbers, for instance.

I would just keep contents of floppies as it is on them. If there are multiple floppies with same SW, then keep all them, marked . Later can go in looking what is different, which work best, and like. That may need plenty of time, so first focus on preservation.  Floppies will not last forever, better said data on them, so should do preserving ASAP.