GoKawiilThis guide is written for practitioners wanting to create disk images of floppy disks with the intention of preserving them for the long-term. This guide will focus on 8-inch, 5.25-inch, 3.5-inch and 3-inch floppy disks and will only focus on getting material from these disks and will not cover writing disks. Other resources are available for further information on floppy disks, as outlined in Section 5.
The guide will assume some basic knowledge on some terms, which include digital preservation and assume that you are familiar with tools such as write blockers and feel confident configuring different pieces of software, using different operating systems and the command line. Further resources on digital preservation and other basics can be found in Section 5. This guide will not be a step-by-step demonstration of all the different tools and floppy controllers; this decision was made as the hardware and software around floppy controllers can change quite quickly, but will serve as a basis on how to get started with floppy disks. The focus will be on imaging and preserving the disks, not on extracting files. However, there will be links to further resources on next steps.
The first iteration of this guide was created as part of the Future Nostalgia project and has multiple sources that feed into it:
Interviews with experts within the retro computing field .
Floppy disks workshops with experts in the digital preservation community.
A number of workshops and other events over the year (including the Copy that Floppy Cafe )
A round of editing and checking by the community.
This work is a continuation of other guides and resources on floppy disks, in particular the Archivist’s Guide to Kryoflux and a workshop at iPRES 2024 which focused on imaging obscure floppy disks .
A list of all contributors can be found at the end of this guide.
The sections of the guide that will be covered are as follows:
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