Floppy disks are several decades old—most disks are damaged and the data stored on them is at risk of being lost. In response, Leontien Talboom, a technology analyst at Cambridge University Libraries and Archives, led a nearly year-long floppy disk preservation project called “Future Nostalgia,” which concluded in January.
Leontien Talboom
Leontien Talboom is a technology analyst at Cambridge University Libraries and Archives, where he transfers materials from a variety of media to make them accessible to archivists.
IEEE Spectrum spoke with Talboom about his work saving data from the Cambridge collection of floppy disks and gathering information about the disks themselves.
Why is it important to save floppy disks now?
Leontien Talboom: Two reasons. First, physical media begins to decline. Floppy disks are made of plastic, but they have a magnetic layer of iron oxide, and that breaks down. Most floppy disks are found in attics or garages, which means they also suffer from mold.
Second, many people who create floppy disks and programs that use floppy disks start to stop or pass away, which means that a lot of confidential information disappears.
Who did you go to for that secret information?
Talboom: I went to the retro computing community. Their job is to keep these machines running [than] data that resides on a floppy disk. But they know their stuff with floppy disks.
For example, they know that on many old disks, the inside of the disk—the donut—sticks to the surface. So if you bend the casing, the donut falls again. If I didn’t know that, I would think that those discs in our collection are broken or damaged.
What is the hardest part of working with floppy disks?
Talboom: Accessing files can be a challenge if we don’t understand the file system. Within libraries and archives, we find many items from less popular machines. Most of the personal computers you had at home, like the Amstrad or the ZX Spectrum or the BBC Micro, were very well documented. But a lot of our stuff comes from business or research projects. They don’t make sense to people, so there isn’t a big community that keeps this kind of stuff.
Do you have a favorite type of floppy disk?
Talboom: A quarter past five. The weirder the show, the more frustrating and exciting it is. I really like doing that detective work.
The Amstrad disc also really stole my heart. The popularity of floppy disks is highly geographically dependent. Our library, for example, has these Amstrad 3-inch discs. But if you go to the US, they are really rare. They couldn’t make enough of these drives, either [3.5-inch disks] he took some time. But they are really good.
What is the best way to store data continuously?
Talboom: The main thing is to take care of it diligently. Most of the floppy disks we get from the library haven’t been accessed for 20 or 30 years, which means you need some special hardware to read them, and then work with emulators or other tools to make these file formats accessible.
Now that we’ve done that work and transferred it, we can monitor it and make sure it doesn’t suffer from anything like bit rot. We can also make decisions about moving it to other file formats or work on specific file systems or unknown file formats in more detail.
From Your Site Locations
Related Topics on the Web
