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How do you backup your data at home?
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(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday August 29 2015, @02:49PM
Yeah, seriously, I have a couple boxes of backup floppies sitting in a closet. Well - a couple boxes of disks, not all backups. I gave up on those when the backup program told me that it would take about 90 disks to complete my backup.
Graduated to optical drives. As time went on, I needed more and more CD's, so I finally bought a DVD burner.
FINALLY, I bought an external hard drive. That was something of a mistake. It's external. People look at it, they seem to think it's some extraneous hardware, and they want to borrow it. Or, they think I keep music and movies on it, so they want to make a copy.
I'm thinking of a RAID. Just connect it to the computer, and I can make all the backups I'll ever need for years to come. I keep looking at the available drives, trying to decide how much to spend.
No, I don't have any off-site backup. I'm to cheap, and none of my stuff is worth the expense anyway.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Monday August 31 2015, @08:03PM
Yes, the disks.
I am about to drop the bucks on a SD card/CF Card/little micro SD card and floppy disk drive extravaganza! Only $11!
Sadly, I have found that the big tower case I have can only host 5.25" drives for show, because modern bioses seem to not support 1.2MB and 360KB floppy options.
I wanted to set my overclocked desktop at 4.77GHz and put it next to my XT running at 4.77MHz and boot off diskettes and complain that things are STILL slow... but no, my plans were ruined.
Interesting thing that I have found is that USB based 1.4MB floppy drives cannot read 720KB diskettes. That really rained on my parade.
I still have diskettes and use them a few times a month. There are situations when it is the only means I have to recover a system or device that I need to recover or reset the password on, and at home... well, they never went out of style!
Besides, they last longer than CDs it seems. I have so many c64 disks that still work.. but the glue on their labels dried out and so now it is like the eternal september of a continuously fading era. The labels fall off like the leaves of a tree... and there will be no renewal or others of their kind to replace them.
A bit dramatic, but I haven't yet backed up all of those old c64 diskettes onto a more solid state format, and probably never will. Once all my disks go bad, I will probably error out myself.
(Score: 1) by bswarm on Tuesday September 01 2015, @05:26PM
I used to use a floppy to back up my Microsoft Money 99 database regularly until... The one time I really needed it because of a hard drive failure, the floppy was corrupt. At no time did any backup say there was a problem with the floppy. Take that as advice if you still use them.
(Score: 1) by SomeGuy on Monday September 07 2015, @02:37AM
If you have actually found a recent motherboard with a real FDC, then for MS-DOS you might be able to use the 2M-XBIOS_version-1.3.zip driver to override your lobotomized bios. Chances are the FDC chip still supports 300kbps and 250kbps low-density operation even if the options have been cut from the bios. Won't help with Windows though. The bigger problem is these boards usually are physically wired up to only operate with ONE floppy drive. Saves the manufactures the expensive costs of running ONE single wire from the FDC chip.
You might also consider a device like the Kryoflux or SuperCard Pro. Although those don't let your read/write files directly.
Actually, some do although many don't. And they never advertise that feature. If they mention they support the Japanese "Mode 3" floppy operation, then they have probably also thrown in 720K support.
Try 3M Super 77 adhesive spray. Excellent for re-attaching labels.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04 2015, @01:32AM
yesssss!
now, how do I easiest make backup of floppy disks?
I have like 800 of them (many 1.72MB formatted) that wants me to
copy their files onto a dvd ...
are there an easy solution (for linux) that both copy the files with each floppy in its own directory named after the floppys label, and also make an disk image file of it (without having to read the floppy twice), that just beeps when it is time to insert next floppy so I can work on other things and don't have to switch to another window to press a key?
ideally it should make a logfile of which floppies/files that had badsectors (but it should ofcourse still copy the files at its best, and make a disk image), so I could perhaps try read those floppies with some other program or computer later.