I'd love to be able to read, write and archive my old 8 floppies, too.
I'd once day-dreamed of getting a Compaticard and dedicating an old PC
to the task.
But as a file-format geek, I always thought a central part of the
nut to crack was a metafile format. Archiving real-world antique
floppies means some of them are going to have bad sectors. (Let's
leave copy-protection errors aside for a moment.) You need an
archiving file format that can record the fact of the known error.
It would also be handy to have a way to store corresponding info
such as a description of the disk's contents, as if you'd be
able to store the label along with the archived disk image.
- John