The Sinclair QL Forum

Backups. We all read the manuals and make a backup, don't we? I have been doing so since i got my first ever QL back in 1984 or 1985. That's a good 32 or 33 years.

Today I decided that rather than having three Posso Boxes full of floppies, I would rip them to image files on my laptop using the dd command. Ha! That did not work well.

As I'm fond of preaching at work "always test your backups regularly" (I'm an Oracle DBA - we do not lose data!) - I suppose I should follow my own advice. Of three Posso Boxes full of floppies, I have rescued and ripped the entire contents of the Digital Precision Collection, 10 discs, and about 5 of my own originals. 15 floppies only!

Everything else is toast! Dilwyn probably remembers how many floppies can fit in a Posso, and I had 3 of them. My disc collection is in the bin.

So, don't make the same mistake, test your backups from time to time!


Cheers,
Norm. [Crying in his gin!]

Ouch! But Gin is good...

I've ripped all of my floppy disks with the dd command and only a few of them gave errors (some were deliberately not formatted to their full capacity, e.g. Minerva and Hermes supplemental disks). However my experience with HD diskettes on a Gold Card with ED drives is that they're not as reliable as DD diskettes - even ED diskettes were more reliable!

Jan

martyn_hill wrote:Ouch! But Gin is good...

It is indeed. My wife made a gin liqueur with rhubarb and orange peel and sugar, left it for a month. It's very tasty. Cheap gin from Aldi or Lidl too. £9.99 a bottle.

Cheers,
Norm.

NormanDunbar wrote: Everything else is toast! Dilwyn probably remembers how many floppies can fit in a Posso, and I had 3 of them. My disc collection is in the bin.
Cheers,
Norm. [Crying in his gin!]

Sympathies Norman.
Yes, i do remember Posso boxes and still have several of them full of disks.
Although many of my original hd disks became unreadable many of them were rescued using a Miracle ed drive, they seemed to like that drive.
Fortunately ALMOST all disks were backed up one way or another. The only exception being the disks with page designer 2 manuals. They are stored in various QXL.WINs on external hard drives and dvds so should be safe until those media break/get stolen/stray n korean missile hits my house

Evening Dilwyn.

Sadly my discs seemed to die in one of two different ways:

- Becoming completely unable to turn, either by hand or in the drive. Totally buggered, to use a well known Scottish expression.

- Turning ok, but you can hear the drive squealing and straining. simply returned 'not an SMS drive'.

I did have a couple that had read errors, but 2 or 3 attempts managed to read the entire disc ok and qltools can read and extract the contents from the image.

I had a mix of branded and noname floppies and all suffered from the same problem, even my stash of unused, brand new (in 1990 something) ones were the same. Sigh. I'll never get upgrades now, i don't have proof of the originals!


Cheers,
Norm.

NormanDunbar wrote:Sadly my discs seemed to die in one of two different ways:

- Becoming completely unable to turn, either by hand or in the drive. Totally buggered, to use a well known Scottish expression.

- Turning ok, but you can hear the drive squealing and straining.

I would have split the disk cartridge open, taken the disk out, and put it in a cartridge that did turn OK, then make a copy.

I thought of that but i dont have a spare cartridge that splits well. They seem to be glued. Of the broken open ones, the magnetic media was stuck to the inner lining material. So would still be buggered i suspect.

Anyway, too late now, they ate off to be recycled tomorrow. The plastic cases anyway and metallic shutters. Sadly the rest are landfill.

I guess i won't be needing my floppy drives anymore!

Cheers,
Norm.