A number of years ago, the cybersecurity office I worked for had a case come through where a 3.5" floppy was found in a drawer in an area which should not have contained any writable media. The investigator on the case had a hell of a time tracking down a drive to read the disk. He got lucky that someone in the organization just happened to have a USB based 3.5" floppy drive which worked. I can’t imagine what we would have done with a 5.25" or 8" floppy. And such disks were known to exist at the site.

The other thing they don’t mention in the article is tapes. A couple decades back I was a sysadmin at a site where we were required to store data archives for 10 years. Given the age of some of the data, it had been archived to DAT tapes and put in storage. The problem was the drive to read those tapes was just as old and had a SCSI interface from about the same time period. So, we also had a vintage SCSI controller for the drive. That controller was for an ISA bus slot. And this was at a time where ISA was just about fully phased out. By the time I left, I don’t think we had a motherboard which could have accepted the controller. We might have been able to source a SCSI controller which used PCI and was the right generation of SCSI to interface with the drive. Then we would have had to hope that Symantec’s Backup Exec would still be able to read the tapes. Given Backup Exec’s propensity to just silently declare, “fuck your backups” this was not something I was hopeful for.

It’s really cool that these folks are doing this work. There are a lot of hidden difficulties but saving that data can be very important.

Don’t Copy That Floppy.