Machine for bulk-archiving thousands of floppies

@OzzyDweller has 5,000 3.5" Amiga floppy disks that he needs to archive, so he built a glorious rube-goldbergian floppy-disk bulk-importing device. It has a magazine filled with floppies that are auto-inserted into a drive, copied, spat out, photographed (so their label art can be captured), and dropped to an untidy higgeldy-piggeldy pile on the floor. He figured out the clever intake and exhaust mechanism by reverse-engineering a bulk floppy writer from eBay.

This last part finally meant I could just load it up with disks and leave it to it. It will hold around 80 disks a time in the hopper, and each one is fed into the drive, ripped to stream & adf format by the kryoflux, then ejected. As it pops out, the solenoid blocks it from going too far, the camera takes its picture and then the solenoid fires letting the disk fall to the ground. Check out a few more pictures of the oddball woodwork & the unit here.

So far in over 300 disks, it has had 1 disk cause a blockage (am I glad I carefully wrote the code to check that!!) which was due to a badly torn and peeling label. We'll ignore the 20 or so disks I had to redo after I turned out the light in the room where it was running & thus had nice black images instead of disk photos.

It takes around 3 to 4 minutes per disk, so I've got a few weekends ahead of me with it running as much as possible.. meanwhile, I need to write some software to let me browse & catalogue all this data!

Converting all my Amiga Disks.. (via Neatorama)

• [Romeo Vitelli]

  What is this “floppy disk” of which you speak?

  • [zarray]

    They were the best! You could peel off this metal plate thing and carve the slayer logo into school desks.

• [Stefan Jones]

  OzzyDweller should submit a write up  / how to for his gadget for Make: Projects

  * * *

  I archived my last hundred or so floppies about three years back. A tedious slog, but such a relief!

  Everything fit on one CD-ROM, which I made multiple copies of.
   
  I don’t think I’ve had to refer back to them since then, but it is nice to know the backups are there. Who knows when I might need that DOS utility that puts a 26th line on a CGA monitor so my IBM PC can display the date and time?

• [Carlson & Crashboy]

  What on Earth could possibly be so important as to require 5,000 disks archived? His MacGIF collection of 2 bit nudes?

  • [EH]

    Hey listen, there’s a lot of that kind of thing that has vanished from the Internet.

  • [xzzy]

    Amiga had a shareware distribution system known as the “fred fish disks”. Google it! It was a worldwide distribution of software demos in an era before you could just pop open a web browser and click a link. 
    There was over a thousand of them published, and are certainly worth archiving (and I believe already are archiving).

    Additionally, this was an era before cd drives and games were growing quickly in size. Sierra games were routinely shipped on 15 floppies. So owning the entire space quest series could easily run you up another several dozen floppies.

    • [Forkboy]

      The biggest game I remember having on my Amiga was 9 disks: Heart Of China. Didn’t care though, I installed that bad boy on my 40Mb hard disk. Oh yeah.

  • [chgoliz]

    I tossed all my old floppies.  Figured, if I haven’t missed anything on them at this point, why bother saving them any longer?

    Anything I ever felt needed saving was upgraded every time there was a new way to store data.  By definition, what was on my floppies was the stuff I hadn’t even cared enough to delete.

    • [EH]

      I have some QIC-60 tapes of my desktop from the early-mid 90s. I wonder how much that stuff is to convert.

• [Jay Converse]

  Those aren’t floppies, they’re stiffies.

  • [Ladyfingers]

    Are you South African, perchance?

    • [ocker3]

       One kid I knew used to call 5.25′ disks floppies and 3.5′ disks hard drives, but my two brothers and I (all geeks taught by our Dad) laughed at him long and hard. There’s still a bit of bend in those semi-rigid housings.

• [bcsizemo]

  So how long does this all take… I mean my average is getting 1 bad floppy out of five, so I proceed to scandisk and try and fix the sector, and repeat, ect..  5000 floppies, 1000 scandisks… at least he automated it.

  Floppies taught me the value of zip/rar with data integrity and protection enabled.

• [johnfoster]

  ahh, the memories of the Douglas Disk Duplicator. what a cantankerous, noisy, and sometimes reliable robot. it ate disks for lunch and burped out money making it the cornerstone of my old software publishing business.

  http://www.douglas.com/hardware/diskduplicator.html

• [nixiebunny]

  And when it’s done, the data will all fit on an 8G flash drive, costing $5 and fitting in your pocket. 

  We have come a long way.

• [Sam Hall]

  People need to stop making things, don’t they realise this has got to be infringing on a patent or two? This is why we need ACTA, to stop the spread of communism!

• [Jeffrey Karter]

  Don’t Copy That Floppy!!!

  Seriously, though, I think I have a floppy drive somewhere, but I haven’t used one in forever. I can see the interest in grabbing the data for historical purposes, but beyond that, if you haven’t needed the data in the past N years, you’ll probably never need it.

  • [zarray]

    Some parts of the US military still use floppies because you can fit a ton of text on it, find it with a metal detector, and they hate change.

    • [Stephen Rice]

      I’m surprised at seeing “you can find it with a metal detector” as an advantage for floppy discs. That’d never occurred to me.

      I think floppy discs are a perfectly fine medium for people who work in text. I don’t particularly miss not having a floppy disc drive but I felt they were fine when I used them.

• [benher]

  Forgive me for unleashing an onslaught of Caps, but… 

  WHERE WAS THIS MACHINE 10 YEARS AGO WHEN I DID THIS BY HAND BLLLLOloooooOOOOoooORRRggghhhh!!

• [Ryan Lenethen]

  This really made me laugh:

  “We’ll ignore the 20 or so disks I had to redo after I turned out the light in the room where it was running & thus had nice black images instead of disk photos.”

  Reminds me of myself a bit. Smart enough to reverse engineer a bulk floppy writer, to think ahead and program for blockages, then leave, turning off the lights forgetting the camera that is setup to take pictures of the labels sort of needs that…

  Anyway not saying that I’m that smart, maybe just that dumb… made me chuckle though. I could empathize with the feeling of “@#$!” walking into the room again realizing what you had done, though I think I would laugh even then.

• [Someone else called Mart]

  “Only Amiga makes it possible”  Only Amiga makes it sort of worth doing… Only Amiga didn’t really play much of a part in this… See it there, in the background not plugged in or anything… Poor bloody iconic computer looking for something to do…

• [Sparrow]

  I could have used something like that a decade ago when I copied 1200 360k floppies to a single CD. Anything that wasn’t personal or local BBS related is easier to find online.

  I’m amazed that no-one here has commented on the music in the background.

• [CognitiveDissident]

  Excuse me, I just had a retro-panic attack.

  That magnetic solenoid was too close to the magnetic floppy, oh nooooo!!

  (Practically useless retro-advice: Don’t set a floppy anywhere near a car stereo speaker!)

• [Eli]

  Heh.  I’ve done the same thing… with Lego NXT, Android and python…  https://retracile.net/blog/2011/01/13/23.30  I now have an improved version that photographs the *back* side of the label; I have a number of them with the labels that wrap around.  I also have it able to create an ISO with a visual index using the perspective-corrected and cropped pictures, .zip of the contents, the raw data read from the floppy, and a browsable tree of the contents.  Oh, and it has lights built in so turning off the room light isn’t a problem. ;)  I’m using a standard USB floppy, so I don’t get the flux data he’s storing though.  I’m hoping to offer it as a service, if I can work out the details.