GoKawiilFloppy disks are several decades old—many of the disks are degrading and the data stored on them is at risk of being lost. In response, Leontien Talboom, a technical analyst at Cambridge University Libraries and Archives, led a roughly year-long project preserving floppy disks called “Future Nostalgia,” which concluded in January.
Leontien Talboom Leontien Talboom is a technical analyst at Cambridge University Libraries and Archives, where she transfers material from a wide range of storage media to make them accessible to archivists.
IEEE Spectrum spoke to Talboom about her work preserving data from Cambridge’s collection of floppy disks and collecting knowledge about the disks themselves.
Why is it important to preserve floppy disks now?
Leontien Talboom: Two reasons. First, the physical media is starting to degrade. Floppy disks are made from plastic, but they’ve got a magnetic layer of iron oxide, and that’s deteriorating. A lot of floppy disks are found in attics or garages, which means they also suffer from mold.
Second, a lot of people who developed floppy disks and systems that use floppy disks are starting to retire or pass away, which means that a lot of tacit knowledge is disappearing.
Whom did you go to for that tacit knowledge?
Talboom: I went to the retro computing community. Their work is more around preserving these machines to keep them running [than] the data that lives on the floppy disk. But they know their stuff about floppy disks.
For example, they know that in a lot of the older disks, the inside of the disk—the doughnut—gets stuck to the top. So if you flex the casing, the doughnut falls down again. If I hadn’t known that, I would have assumed that those disks in our collection were broken or corrupt.
What is the most difficult part of working with floppy disks?
... continue reading