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Archiving Floppy Disks

For MS-DOS floppies I would just zip the files. But for other systems I image the floppy, with 'dd' on Linux (with the proper setup for whatever format it is). Way back in time I also used zip to copy files from the old minicomputer, I thought (at that time) that it was pointless to image the disks (particularly harddisks) because it was the files that mattered. But when I started writing my emulator I realised that it was images I needed.. fortunately I had a few images. So now I image the old floppies too, and can access them from my emulator. I just wish I had images of more of my old disks instead of having just file-backups of so many of them.

-Tor
 
Thanks for everyone's thoughts. Sorry for stirring up a fuss...

Sounds like perhaps the ideal thing would be to use Winimage to create an image file and go from there. Looks like you can easily open the image file in Winmage and extract the files from it. No more data than old floppies hold, I think I'll just do it both ways...images for if they are necessary, but the files copied out of them for direct install purposes when it will work to do so.

I'm mainly just wanting to preserve what's on the disks for the future...as others have mentioned, any time you read a disk, it could easily be its last successful read...

Thanks,

Wesley
 
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