Re: Restoring dead floppies

In comp.sys.mac.vintage, scole  <vintageapplemac@gmail.com> wrote:

So, I have a large collection of vintage Mac games, something in the
order of 160 or so, most of which are "big box" games, about half of
which are CD-ROM and the other half floppy disk. Sadly, but inevitably,
many of the floppy disks are now dead; they do not mount to desktop.
Seeing as they're all 30 or more years old, it's no surprise that disk
rot has finally got them, but still a bit sad.
 
It did make me wonder, though, is there any value in going to the
effort to restore the disks? I mean, I know the answer is "No, none
whatsoever" but... the idea that these games are now little more than
ornaments on my shelf rather than actual useable software depresses me
a little.
 
It should be trivial to find digital back-ups of these on the web but
are these disks physically beyond use now, or is it just data
corruption? If I were to format the disks, would I be able to place the
software back onto them?

I gather archivists use special hardware, search for "Greaseweazle",
that is better at finding every fluctation of magnetic flux. And also
imaging multiple times, sometimes.

See also:
https://hackaday.com/2024/02/28/flux-is-your-friend-for-archiving-old-floppy-disks/

If it is a game or program that has not previously been preserved (in
non-cracked format) there are probably people who will be happy to
borrow the disk to image it with their hardware and then return it. (If
you are willing to take the risk. Even with honest people, mail gets
damaged sometimes.)

4am ( https://mastodon.social/users/a2_4am/ ) mostly works with Apple II
disks, but his crowd does some Mac stuff. I knew him from Twitter first
some years ago. All of his stuff ends up at archive.org:

https://archive.org/details/apple_ii_library_4am

Elijah
------
there's so much educational software there