Preserving Legacy Data: The Importance of Floppy Disk Preservation

Hackaday reports on the challenges of preserving data stored on magnetic storage devices from the 80s and 90s, such as floppy disks . These storage methods are slowly degrading, making data recovery difficult after several decades. However, in a recent project, the Bloop Museum was able to successfully decode information from a 5.25" floppy disk last written to in 1993 using a DEC PDP-11. They used a GreaseWeazle controlled by a Raspberry Pi to generate an audio file from the data on the disk and then worked backwards to extract usable information. The data on the disk was from a digital stenography machine, and decoding it required further expertise.

Source: Hackaday .