Media recovery (was Re: 16kb variant of the IBM 5150)

On 8/3/13 5:00 AM, Peter Corlett wrote: You REALLY need to deal with the DC300's and DAT tapes because the rubber in the drives WILL fail if it hasn't already. DAT and 8mm was never very reliable to begin with. The tension belts in the DC300s have most likely lost tension as well. Floppies aren't as big a deal. If they are in a format that a PC floppy controller can deal with you probably have at least 10 years to image them. The only thing that should fail in that time span will be the drive belts on 8" drives that have them. I expect that if you squirrel away enough 3" or 5" drives with direct drive that the media you could read today will still be readable then if stored in a cool low humidity environment. I've read several thousand disks from Don Maslin's collection this year and had very high recovery success even though they had been stored in a hot humid storage locker for the past five years. It was of value to learn that the Shugart double-sided drive seems to be significantly less prone to carving concentric grooves in the media than Qume full-height or half- height drives. The heads are also much easier to get at to clean. I've also been reading a very large collection of MS-DOS era 5" disks that were stored in a hot but dry environment (Stockton) and haven't had too much trouble. The exception are Brown Disks and Memorex, but that is a known problem. I would suggest, though, that you think about prioritizing what you have saved. It isn't difficult to dig around the web to see what has already been read. Unfortunately, people have been doing a pretty sloppy job of keeping track of things like if it was read from original media, if a game, if its' cracked, etc. We just received a donation of several hundred original Apple II game disks, for example, and I have not been able to find anything to tell me the provenance of the images that are already out there. I'm not very excited about going through them, since I know that almost all of them will be copy protected. Something else I wonder about is why Deluxe Option boards still sell for so much money with the better alternatives that are out there now. Are there disk image files floating around in the underground that only work with hacked software for that board? You couldn't save images to disk with the software that shipped with the board for obvious reasons.