Ask Slashdot: Recovering Data From 20-Year-Old Diskettes?

First time accepted submitter Zilog writes "The end of the 3.5-inch floppy and the disappearance of associated drives showed to me the need to backup the tens of diskettes that accompanied my youth. Carefully preserved, these diskettes have proved readable for the most part — while some are approaching 20 years old. However, some diskettes have shown surface defects in areas with compressed archives (zip). Any ideas on how to recover (as much as possible) these bad sectors?"

Comments

This guy did it with a 35-year-old disk pack . . .

[Brietech]

He hooked his own analog-to-digital converter up to the read-head and post-processed the heck out of it to recover the data.

http://chrisfenton.com/cray-1-digital-archeology/

Rosetta Disk

[roguegramma]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Project

The technology is also available to the public, I believe, but I would guess it isn't cheap.

Also the amounts of data aren't as large as traditional media.