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Backing up Floppies


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Rather than polluting the eBay thread, what would be the best way to backup 80+ floppies please?

 

Attached to my TI (other than real floppy drives) I have a TIPI, Gotek & IDE

 

Just create folders and copy files using Force Command? Use a disk manager?

 

Any thoughts please?

 

Many thanks 

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I would say that saving to an IDE image would be very good, as we could use TIImagetool to access it , but any of these would work. Not everyone has TIPI (Me), but I'm remeding that and will have. Keeping a true 1 to 1 disk image would perserve the disk as they were received. But any of these would be great. The fastest may be TiPi.

Edited by RickyDean
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I mentioned a TI disk archive program in another thread.  It works very well and creates usable images, though (IIRC) it adds a little more data to the image.  (But you do not have real drives on your TI.)

 

If you are just wanting to make dsk images, there is now a plethora of disk imaging utilities and reasonably-priced hardware out there.  The FD-5025, the Greaseweasel, SuperCard+, and the good ol' KryoFlux.  I have used everything listed except the Greaseweasel, which I plan to get my grubby hands on sometime soon.

 

Once you have your images, put them on a NAS, on OneDrive, DropBox, archive.org, WHTech, USB thumb drives mailed to random people, M-Disc, and encoded in DNS (remember DeCSS on DNS?)  You could also get a tattoo, like the Universal Time Code.

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28 minutes ago, RickyDean said:

The fastest may be TiPi.

You know... it might could be considered an abuse, and probably not sanctioned by @jedimatt42, but it might be possible to use one of the aforementioned pieces of kit to read a floppy disk directly into an image on the TIPI.  Yeah... why not take a step back in technology and use the TIPI to access a real floppy drive directly??

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So many options... 

 

I don't think for these disks in particular there's much point in worrying about a bit for bit copy?

 

The more I think about it the more I'm leaning towards using floppy disk images on the gotek (and copying from disk to disk) AND making file copies into folders on the TIPT (for easy access)

 

 

 

 

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11 hours ago, OLD CS1 said:

I mentioned a TI disk archive program in another thread.  It works very well and creates usable images, though (IIRC) it adds a little more data to the image.  (But you do not have real drives on your TI.)

Will have a hunt around for this, thanks, as it may be the best option if it runs on a TI

 

I have 1 x gotek & 3 x 5.25" attached to the TI (+TIPI +IDEv3) so I assume I could use it?

 

Many thanks

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@Atari2600PAL 
 

I have backed up about 7000-8000 floppies of both formats, 5.25 and 3.5, and about 1500 cassette tapes.
for the Floppy disks, if you have the possibility, I can only suggest using the TI99 + PEB + Gotek (or similar) solution.

 

I have also tried firsthand other newer peripherals such as Greaseweasel or previously even Kryoflux and have not had the same results with the certainty of operation. These cards pass over any read errors often creating backups that may not work, maybe you see the files in the disk images but then, you could discover they are to be corrupted (all or partially). This also happens because the floppies are often old and dirty and after a few reads (but if the floppy is very dirty even one read is enough) the heads get dirty and the reads give more errors all the time, the heads need to be cleaned often. 

 

By making the copy using the actual PEB with a Gotek or HxC SD instead, indeed, it takes longer but in the end, you are sure that if the disk was copied it means that the read was successful and therefore the copy is working.
By the way, when the floppies give errors and I can't back up I have procedures that I follow. First of all, I use a head cleaning kit right away at the first errors and then I try the reading again. 
In some cases, the head may also have become very dirty, and the drive may no longer read any disk and the cleaning disk may not be sufficient. At that point, I act directly on the floppy drive head using a cotton swab (gently).
If it still doesn't go I put the floppy disk aside because then I will try it on other drives floppy models (I have about ten different ones) because often the mechanics and the alignment of the head or the different stepper motor can also give different results. 
If even this last try fails, before I give up at all on the floppy with error, just as a last resort, I use a special floppy drive (built by a friend of mine), which allows me to clean the magnetic surface of the disk as it spins.

 

With all these steps I have recovered quite a few floppies, and only by making the copy with the actual hardware do I have the confidence that everything works.

 

I also checked other backups released over the years by other users who had used Kryoflux and half of the images, often were corrupted :( 


Just my two cents to explain my experience of doing this kind of thing. Then everyone does as they can :)

 

Edited by ti99iuc
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For my convenience and because I have always felt comfortable I use Disk Manager 1000 v6.00
This is because I find it present among the software that is part of the XB v2.7 cartridge and now I know it by heart with commands so I go pretty fast to use it.


It also allows me to make copies of individual files and this helps to save the salvageable to a disk with errors only on a part of the disk.
I don’t have much experience with other copiers so in case I would also be happy to discover something new and better.


If floppies are copy-protected, this may not be enough. but I found very few and only the originals mostly. 

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11 minutes ago, ti99iuc said:


For my convenience and because I have always felt comfortable I use Disk Manager 1000 v6.00
This is because I find it present among the software that is part of the XB v2.7 cartridge and now I know it by heart with commands so I go pretty fast to use it.


It also allows me to make copies of individual files and this helps to save the salvageable to a disk with errors only on a part of the disk.
I don’t have much experience with other copiers so in case I would also be happy to discover something new and better.


If floppies are copy-protected, this may not be enough. but I found very few and only the originals mostly. 

Many thanks

 

Have just been creating 45 GoTek images for the first batch (360K), but just realised I haven't checked what type of disks the originals are so may be best to match the original size otherwise its a waste of space

 

 

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for the DiskCopy option, I always created different folders with all possible formats SSSD, DSSD, SSDD, DSDD, and 50 empty disk images in each folder as you thought indeed.
Better to use the same empty image format of the disk so that you will save time because otherwise, the system will need to format the images if it recognizes a different format among the Original and the backup image. 

I hope you will succeed :). Archival and preserving material is also my passion.

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I tried DM1000 6.2 but it just hangs up at "checking format". It doesn't access any drives, just hangs instantly at the start of the copy

 

So I tried the Backup option in DM2 and that seems to work ok

 

Have copied the first 3 disks (of the 45 labelled nnnA) and they contain texts from the Bible with a program on each to search for text and display/print passages that match the entered keyword search

 

As it takes a while to copy a disk I think I'll go thru the 45 USGROP disks with DIR and see if there are any that don't look like the ones I've done so far

 

 

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On 4/19/2024 at 12:55 PM, Atari2600PAL said:

Rather than polluting the eBay thread, what would be the best way to backup 80+ floppies please?

 

Attached to my TI (other than real floppy drives) I have a TIPI, Gotek & IDE

 

Just create folders and copy files using Force Command? Use a disk manager?

 

Any thoughts please?

 

Many thanks 

I tend to use DSK2PC and a hdx setup.. but it's kinda slow .. makes a nice dsk file though as a result..

 

Best to just copy them to TIPI folders for whatever doesn't need sector copy.

 

Alternatively a greaseweazle board on the PC with a 360k drive is a great fast way to image disks.  they would go into hfe format then need to be converted to dsk v9t9 format files after that 

 

 

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I've now copied all 45 disks that were just labelled with numbers (e.g. 587A) to the TIPI

 

I doubt there's anything useful on them but I've attached a directory list of the files in case anyone wants to have a scan thru

 

If nothing else I've got 45 identical working floppies (just need some new labels) that can join my pile of blank disks for my 99 & C64

 

disklist.txt

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I've not tried to read the other 47 disks (probably won't re-use these for anything though as they are a mixed bag of disks)

 

They are labeled though, so here are images in case anyone thinks anything is worth investigation further

 

Many thanks

IMG_3776.jpeg

IMG_3777.jpeg

IMG_3778.jpeg

IMG_3779.jpeg

IMG_3780.jpeg

IMG_3781.jpeg

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48 minutes ago, RickyDean said:

I'd think that they're all, worth archiving, if they aren't know to be in the WHTECH repository or other accessible places. The Latin disk is one I haven't seen as well as others.

I will be trying to copy the other 47 when I get a chance (will then store away the originals)

 

Question is, once I have all these disks on TIPI can I just copy them into a zip with my MacBook or will that cause issues with the files please?

 

Currently I've used the 99 to copy a couple of the tipi copies into GoTek images so I can try them with Classic99, but transferring almost a 100 to GoTek images will take some time

 

Many thanks

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3 minutes ago, Atari2600PAL said:

Question is, once I have all these disks on TIPI can I just copy them into a zip with my MacBook or will that cause issues with the files please?

I cannot see how the files would be damaged or changed in any way.  This should work fine.

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Many years ago I used an RS232 cable from my TI99/4A to a IBM PC running PC99

Yes it was slow and painful to copy 20 meg of files over RS232

Now today my TI folder on my PC the TI folder is 24.2 Gig, and yes I know there are tons of Duplicates.

I think the biggest increase on the PC is not the TI stuff, it is the PDF files converted from TEXT to PDF

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3 minutes ago, RXB said:

I think the biggest increase on the PC is not the TI stuff, it is the PDF files converted from TEXT to PDF

Which is unreasonable.  PDF has a simple text rendering mode which makes converted text files much smaller.  But, far too many programs make an image of the printed text, then embed that into the PDF.  Depending upon the image type, it can be stupid large.

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3 hours ago, OLD CS1 said:

Which is unreasonable. 

 

Well, if you like to preserve using good quality and preserving also the original layout of the pages (not only a simple TXT),  it is not unreasonable.

Some Magazines in PDFs with many pages, images, and colors, for example, cannot occupy little disk space in terms of Mb.

For the Books, the PDF can be lighter of course but it depends on what you want to preserve. I have seen some smaller PDFs of books that have a bad quality and it is especially discovered when when you zoom in on the page. With low-quality text and serrated font graphics. 

You have to think about preservation in the future as well because maybe what you see on the screen today might be acceptable enough even at low quality, but as the years go by and technology advances with more and more defined screens, a low-quality scan today might be completely inadequate in a few years. 

My thought is that it is better to try to preserve as best you can today, also because today there is not this problem of not having storage space available as there used to be in the past. 

Then who knows if maybe what takes up so much today because it is qualitatively superior may not take up less space in the future because new, more efficient, lossless compression algorithms will be invented :) but at least most of the work is already done.

Edited by ti99iuc
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1 hour ago, ti99iuc said:

Well, if you like to preserve using good quality and preserving also the original layout of the pages (not only a simple TXT),  it is not unreasonable.

I specifically addressed text files.

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