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Few nostalgic artifacts capture the spirit of the early personal computing era as clearly as the humble floppy disk. Introduced in the early 1970s, these chunky rectangles became the default way to store and transfer digital information for more than two decades before CDs and USB drives rendered them obsolete. Over that period, tens of billions were likely produced. Today, most of those floppies are left to slowly decay in distant landfills, moldy garages, or long-forgotten storage boxes.
Abandoning those floppies entirely risks relegating decades worth of scientific research, government records, software, and personal correspondence to the dustbin of history. But recovering all that data stored on the floppies is far more complicated than simply plugging in an old drive. Floppy disks came in various sizes and dozens of incompatible formats. And as the hardware capable of reading them fails and disappears, some warn that vast amounts of early digital history could slip into a “Digital Dark Age.”
Leontien Talboom, an archivist at Cambridge University Library, has spent the past several years working to keep that from happening. In collaboration with retro computing enthusiasts who have built specialized floppy-imaging tools, she’s recovered data from hundreds of historically significant disks in the library’s collection—including previously inaccessible lectures by physicist Stephen Hawking.
As part of the university’s Future Nostalgia project, Talboom recently helped publish a comprehensive guide to imaging floppy disks for preservation (appropriately called Copy That Floppy!), a step that could give archivists and hobbyists worldwide a fighting chance to rescue data before magnetic decay renders it unreadable.
“I’m not the only one doing this within my community, but I was the only one posting about it online and it made me feel very much like, wait, am I really the only one talking about this?” Talboom tells Popular Science. “Like, there’s no one else seeing this as a problem? Why is no one talking about this?”
Talboom removes mold and other debris from floppies in preparation for imaging. Image: Courtesy of Leontien Talboom
It might not seem like it now in the world of terabyte hard drives and seemingly infinite cloud storage, but floppy disks were surprisingly enduring. Certain aspects of the airline and medical industries actually still use floppy disks to run critical updates on old hardware. Up until 2019, the US military still used an 8-inch floppy disk as a core component of managing its nuclear weapons arsenal. The Japanese government still required floppies for some government administrative purposes as recently as two years ago, despite the fact the last major manufacturer of the disks (Sony) stopped producing them more than a decade earlier.
Though imperfect, floppies were relatively cheap and durable, which helped them gain mass adoption. Rather than invest the time and money required to retrofit older systems with new storage technologies, many institutions simply kept using floppies, hence their stubbornly long life spans.
But like any other magnetic storage medium, floppies degrade over time. Specifically, the iron oxide coating bound to the disk’s thin plastic film can break down when exposed to heat, humidity, or mold. As that coating deteriorates, the data encoded in its magnetic patterns can become unreadable. Left uncared for, an aging floppy’s memory may simply fade away.
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