From: Dennis Boone <drb at msu.edu> Dear all, You may be familiar with the phenomenon of a project list years long, and with the way it often gets ordered: "project #345 sounds interesting today." Well, this weekend, I finally managed to combine motivation, interest and parts, and assemble a working 5.25" + catweasel floppy imaging setup. This moved up the priority list because the machine I usually use to image floppies can't do SD, and these old Osborne 1 floppies have been on my desk staring at me since someone on IRC asked about Oz-ware weeks ago... I'm want to have backups of my piles of floppies, as well as to be at least a somewhat responsible preserver (in the unlikely event I actually managed to hang onto something not already widely saved), and to be able to share bits and pieces as seems appropriate. I'd like to be able to both re-create floppies as well as use the data in emulation. I understand the latter is going to require format conversions in a lot of cases, and that the necessary converters may or may not exist yet. I've used both ImageDisk and cw2dmk in the past. What I'm wondering is this: what about the DMK or IMD formats is going to cause me problems later? I prefer data images to flux images because the latter are clearly not directly usable in any emulator. I understand how a flux image enables more accurate re-creation of a real floppy, but the scope and implications of that are a bit fuzzy. I'd like to have some feel for how many things I'm going to be unable to reproduce later, how they'll go wrong, why images won't be useful to others, etc. Obviously no single solution is suitable for all applications, my mileage will vary, &c. Both of the above-mentioned are excellent pieces of work with many valid applications. I suppose I'm basically looking for war stories which illustrate particular technical issues here -- the criteria for making the choices, not the mythical "best answers". I've spent some time googling through the cctalk archives without finding the kinds of discussion I was hoping for, but I'll cheerfully accept hints about how to approach the problem that way. De