What It Takes to Preserve Floppy Disks

All my childhood Apple II 5 1/4" floppies have been mirrored, so I can visit those files in an emulator any time I want. But I'll miss the crazy amount of control the system had over the physical disk drive. Nibble counting, half tracks, quarter tracks, spiral tracks, tracks 35+, weak bits... it was like an adventure game built directly into the machine.

The internally linked article is much better than this https://www.digipres.org/the-floppy-guide/

Cyclomethicone is getting hard to get depending on your jurisdiction. I think it's shelf-stable though, so if you think this might be something you want to do in the future, maybe get some now.

(But also, the disks aren't getting any younger. Do it now.)

I would like to see approaches to recovering data from fragile disks by placing the inner disk on a flat surface and using some kind of imaging technology to measure the magnetic fields - perhaps an electron microscope could do the job at low enough field strengths?

Using this I imagine it might be possible to not only read the disk data, but perhaps even previous versions of data that has been overwritten.

Mostly everyone over 40, and even some younger ones, still have some old floppy disks with files that may or may not be of value.

Somewhere in my mother's house, there still is (hopefully) a floppy disk from 2006-2007 with my teenage self's diary. I wish it is preserved

When I moved out from my parents I took a box with aprox 100 floppies. I was pleasently surprised when only 2 were unreadeable all others were ok. The other box with CDs had a much higher "fault rate". Go figure.

What it actually takes is taking the floppy disc out, cleaning any mold on it, putting it back in the case, and then using greaseweazle to image the magnetic flux of the disc.

Preserving old original floppy disks may be useful, for several reasons, but I myself got rid of all my floppy disks many years ago when USB sticks became viable; even ages ago already, e. g. using CDs and DVDs getting rid of floppy disks - so actually those USB devices killed my use case for floppy disks, CDs and DVDs. I still like DVDs but having USB sticks is simply more convenient in the long run.

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