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[Starrunner]

(There is a question in here, believe it or not.)

After I got the A1200 tower, I decided to start going through my vast mess of Amiga floppies. Some wheere mine, and some had belonged to a friend who had given me his 500, which I still have.

I dreaded this task. I figured that at least 50% of what I had would have just died on me. most of these disks were a decade old, some more like 15 and a couple pushing 20 years.

Too my surprise, it appears that more than 70% of it survived. I had kept them in disk cases, but I didn't do that much for them.

Needless to say I have been archiving them to my hard drive as I go. My question becomes, besides archiving them to my HD, or another floppy, what kind of backup media could I use?

[Dopuser]

My question becomes, besides archiving them to my HD, or another floppy, what kind of backup media could I use?

If you are familiar with AmigaDOS then just write a some simple script that checks if new floppy is inserted in DF0: and then will carry out conversion to adf/adz onto harddrive... tip: it is quite simply under DOpus Magellan...

[Amiduffer]

Other ways:

Pack all the contents of a disk with LHA, and burn them onto a CD.

Pack all the contents of a disk with DMS, and burn them onto a CD.

Pack all the contents of a disk with ADF, and burn them onto a CD.

There's Zip and Jaz disks, Compact Flash.

[TjLaZer]

I use ADF2disk and the GUI on Aminet, works great!

[Dopuser]

TjLaZer wrote:
I use ADF2disk and the GUI on Aminet, works great!

If you have to back-up a few floppies then ADF2disk (or lha, dms) is fine... if you have more than hundred then why not to use power of AmigaDOS ? Script is much more convinient... just put floppy in, script wll detect the change in DF0:, then it will read out the name, then will pack and save as adf with original name... piece of cake... this AmigaOS, gentlemens, not Windows...

[madsjm]

Reading the disk name might sound like a good idea, but I think it may introduce more problems than it actually solves.
For example, many savedisks have names like Empty, Saves etc. You would have to take into account that many floppies may have the same name?
Besides.. Floppies with games, demos etc may have names which you won't be able to understand once you have saved hundred of them as adf. If you can read the labels, it's far easier to spend the extra 3 seconds writing a sensible file name.

Just my 2000 cents.

[Dopuser]

madsjm wrote:
Reading the disk name might sound like a good idea, but I think it may introduce more problems than it actually solves.

How long time - you think - it takes to modify script with a some input request like you suggest ? Just:
"Do you accept the original name: abcd_1 ?"
If you select "no" then input name requester may appear... just me 1 cent more...

Hey, I have a related question here.

I have often used ADF2DISK to write .adf files back to a floppy but I tried to use it to convert a floppy to an .adf image and... failed...

The floppy I tried convert to an image had no read errors and was not copy protected. It seems I am missing something about the complete syntax of this command.

I have OS 3.9 installed in my machine and both boingbags. Maybe something in there's even better...

[LoadWB]

I have always used DMS to the hard drive. Floppy sets get stored in drawers. mkisofs the main store, then burn that ISO to CD or DVD using my Solaris or Windows box, using good media. On the Solaris box I use a 12/24GB tape to back up the ISO images, or the raw files. Then I wind up with about four copies of what I had before. Now that CF cards are so inexpensive, as are USB sticks, there's more media on which to store my treasure troves.

In the past I used Zip disks. I actually started making backups of my 1581 and 1541 disks as .d64 and .d81 (or just a right file copy using FD0: device on 1581 disks.)

I work with Sendmail a lot and I remember one time reading someone say that Sendmail's strength is its unlimited configurability, and Sendmail's weakness is its unlimited configurability. I see Amiga as much the same... so many choices!

[madsjm]

@Dopuser:
I'm just saying I could probably archive 100 floppies before you are finished debugging your script. :-P

If someone can write / has written that kind of script, please let me know, as I am in the process of archiving all my floppies. :-)

Edit: I use a utility called readdisk to archive the floppies. It tries to re-read damaged blocks 20-30 times (I forgot), and archives the floppy to adf. I got it from a guy over at www.exotica.org.uk.
I then burn the adfs to cd or dvd, and keep a copy on my pc.

[rdolores]

About a year ago, I read an article that floppy disks did not have an unlimited life, perhaps 20 years at the max. Since I got my Amiga back in 1986, many of my floppies were pushing the 20-year limit. So I used DMS to convert them into Disk Images and stored them on an external HD on my A2000. Then I brought my external HD to my WinXP machine and copied it to a directory on that machines HD. Eventually, I could burn it to CD or DVD. But right now I have two backups, one on my PC and one on my Amiga.

Another advantage to doing this is that I can now access those Disk Images on my WinUAE setup on my WinXP machine.

I was fortunate, I only had 2 or 3 floppies that were unreadable out of well over 100.

[Dopuser]

madsjm wrote:

I'm just saying I could probably archive 100 floppies before you are finished debugging your script. :-P

The script will take up to 10 lines probably... no big deal... check out medianotify.lha archive from Aminet...

[reddwarfer]

When you ADF the disks, make something in the script to name the disk incrementing numbers and write numbers on the disk then at a later date you could rename the files.