I have over a thousand 8" disks here from all
kinds of system
The Computer History Museum has roughly 10,000 floppies, mostly 5 1/4" that
I need to deal with as Software Curator, with more coming in every week.
The plan is to preserve them as images, with interpretation and verification
of contents to follow.
Like it or not, I'm using ImageDisk as the
standard to store and access
file content.
That should be fine for most soft-sectored formats. At this point it's
more important to get the bits into some form that preservation through
replication can start. It would be a good thing to start fingerprinting
files with MD5 checksums and building a data base of known good images.
Sadly, it appears through lack of response that Don Maslin's archive is
going to have to be redone.
I have several hundred disc images done as dmks that will have to be
converted at some point.
You'll also need to worry about virus checking, and verifing that the disc
actually contains what you think it does, too.