Date   : Sun, 16 Sep 2012 14:05:22 +0100
From   : patrick.hogan@... (Patrick Hogan)
Subject: Should I keep my 5.25" disks?

In reply to everyone...

I took the slightly roundabout route of buying a cheap-ish (40 quid) Acorn
A7000 machine (from CJE) and installing a 5.25" drive in it. I used an old
Beeb drive for this, and found it was very fussy about cable length. I had
to remove the 3.5" disk from the chain and use the shortest ribbon cable I
could before it would work without errors. I then used !DFSreader to read
the DFS-format disks.

I also replaced the HDD in the A7000 with a 2GB CF card (made by
Transcend), using a StarTech CF-to-IDE adapter. This was initially a hassle
as not all CF cards work without throwing up lots of disk errors. A 4GB
card didn't work, for example.

It was then just a case of copying all the floppies to the A7000 and
sorting them into a rought ADFS hierarchy. I went with this approach
because I one day hope to create a HDD image, with everything on it, that
an emulated Beeb can use, rather than mucking about with floppy disk images.

The main reason I went with this approach (apart from wanting an excuse to
buy an A7000!) was that none of the modern PCs I own have a floppy drive
interface on the motherboard. If they had, I could have probably used
something like OmniFlop and a standard PC 5.25" drive.

The only thing I can't (currently) emulate the Music 5000, so I'll need to
keep a few floppies for that. (I've got a RetroClinic DataCentre which will
probably help with this, but that's on my to-do list.)

I've got about 300 floppies, including the new ones, so they don't take up
huge amounts of space, but I'll probably ditch the "used" ones and keep the
"new" ones - the "used" ones are more likely to be dirty/scratched and thus
less useful for future legacy requirements.

The A7000 backs up to an NFS share on my Linux server (using the excellent
Sunfish NFS client for RISCOS), which then gets backed up to an external
HDD *and* Amazon S3. I also put the CF card in the Linux box from time to
time and make an image of it as a single file. This is, I hope, enough
belts and braces to cope with most situations!

Regards,

Patrick

On 16 September 2012 12:38, Peter Hicks <peter.hicks@...> wrote:

>
> On 16 September 2012 12:25, Patrick Hogan <patrick.hogan@...> wrote:
>
> I've just finished copying the contents of all my old 5.25" Beeb floppies
>> to a modern machine, and this data is now securely backed up in multiple
>> locations. I'm very impressed that they retained the data with only three
>> or four errors in total - some of the disks are over 25 years old.
>>
>
> On this very subject, I have a load of floppies here and a couple of Beebs
> in a plastic box.
>
> I'd really like to back the floppies up somehow - can anyone advise on the
> best/most appropriate way to do it?
>
>
> Peter
>
>