All those floppies

For the longest time, I had this huge stack of floppy disks dating back to the nineties (and even some from the late eighties). Discs from the ancient world of MS DOS, drivers, games, and even an odd file or two.

I couldn’t get myself to get rid of them because, at the back of my mind, I was thinking that “Well, maybe someday I’d want to resurrect an old computer and turn it into just the way things were in the 1990’s.” Time warp.

But then let’s face it. I doubt I’d go that far. And besides, the darn disks were taking up too much space in my closet.

Solution: First, I bought a USB floppy drive. That’s because in this day and age I no longer had any functioning floppy drives left in my arsenal.

Next, I took photos of all the disks (front… and back, if something was labeled there), so that I’d have a visual on what they were. Also, if there were serial numbers and the like on the label, then I won’t lose this info.

And then I used a program called Floppy Image to create archive copies of the disks. I made a spreadsheet to log what these disks were and encoded the photos so I’d know what the corresponding disks looked like.

Note: The current version of Floppy Image, Version 2.3, is not free. Fortunately, I had an older version, 1.5, which was free. If any of you want a copy, just give me a heads-up.

Having done that, I could finally toss away the disks without feeling much remorse. Worse comes to worse, I can always reconstruct a floppy from scratch–even print a label if I wanted to.