"A DiskVaccuum For Obsolete Disk Formats"

On Sun, Jan 12, 2014 at 07:43:33PM +0000, Liam Proven wrote: I suspect that these groups think that there's actual money to be made in restoring old media. With a few high-profile exceptions, this is quite far from the truth. [...] As you know, I've recently discovered TOSEC and have been hoovering up the media they've been archiving. At least on the Amiga side, the file formats are completely open: one ZIP file per image, with the contents being a raw disk dump in the case of floppies (aka "ADF"), and a CUE file plus the raw ISO-9660 filesystem and uncompressed WAV files for CD-ROM media. I note that my very slow-moving archival project of my Amiga media also produced files that are bit-identical with TOSEC, which is encouraging. I don't know what they've been using to do the transfers, but I've been using an Amiga 1200 with a CF card and a copy of "SuperDuper" configured to dump to file instead of another floppy. On the modern hardware side, I just used a USB CF card reader on a Linux box (Debian natively understands RDB and FFS) to read the data, and I slapped together a Perl script to do the postprocessing from SuperDuper's custom IFF disk image format into the de facto standard ADF format. I'm not quite sure how I'm going to read all the HD disks I wrote on my somewhat ill Amiga 4000 that isn't really up to being run for long periods to do the data recovery. (Plus it doesn't have a CF slot.) [...] Reading between the lines, TOSEC pretty much started up as an Amiga warez operation that was collecting stuff that's basically abandonware at this point. If anybody wants my Perl script, they're welcome to it for nowt :)