floppy low level format question

On Mon, 2004-06-14 at 18:40, Tom Jennings wrote: That does seem to be the case from what others have said so far. I should have actually made myself a bit clearer - in that I'm only interested in backing up floppies and being able to restore them later. I don't need to actually understand the contents on the machine which is performing the backup. Having said that, I'd rather not have each floppy take up several megabytes due to overampling of the data stream - so I do still need to make sense of bit transitions and record those. "being able to restore them later" is perhaps a seperate project - I'd be almost content just knowing that I had a copy of the raw data from a floppy in the event of failure, even if currently I had no way of restoring it. Being able to do this from one platform, at least for any FM/MFM encoded soft-sectored floppy (which for me is what 99% of my collection uses) is pretty desirable. If I had room I'd have all my machines set up and laid out - but as it stands nearly everything has to reside stored away, which means it's a pain to do anything as soon as some new software lands on the doorstep. cheers Jules