The archivist preserving decaying floppy disks

Few nostalgic artifacts capture the spirit of the early personal computing era as clearly as the humble floppy disk. Introduced in the early 1970s, these chunky rectangles became the default way to store and transfer digital information for more than two decades before CDs and USB drives rendered them obsolete. Over that period, tens of billions were likely produced. Today, most of those floppies are left to slowly decay in distant landfills, moldy garages, or long-forgotten storage boxes.

Abandoning those floppies entirely risks relegating decades worth of scientific research, government records, software, and personal correspondence to the dustbin of history. But recovering all that data stored on the floppies is far more complicated than simply plugging in an old drive. Floppy disks came in various sizes and dozens of incompatible formats. And as the hardware capable of reading them fails and disappears, some warn that vast amounts of early digital history could slip into a “Digital Dark Age.”

Leontien Talboom, an archivist at Cambridge University Library, has spent the past several years working to keep that from happening. In collaboration with retro computing enthusiasts who have built specialized floppy-imaging tools, she’s recovered data from hundreds of historically significant disks in the library’s collection—including previously inaccessible lectures by physicist Stephen Hawking.

As part of the university’s Future Nostalgia project, Talboom recently helped publish a comprehensive guide to imaging floppy disks for preservation (appropriately called Copy That Floppy!), a step that could give archivists and hobbyists worldwide a fighting chance to rescue data before magnetic decay renders it unreadable.

“I’m not the only one doing this within my community, but I was the only one posting about it online and it made me feel very much like, wait, am I really the only one talking about this?” Talboom tells Popular Science. “Like, there’s no one else seeing this as a problem? Why is no one talking about this?”

a woman works on a floppy disk drive — Talboom removes mold and other debris from floppies in preparation for imaging. *Image: Courtesy of Leontien Talboom*

It might not seem like it now in the world of terabyte hard drives and seemingly infinite cloud storage, but floppy disks were surprisingly enduring. Certain aspects of the airline and medical industries actually still use floppy disks to run critical updates on old hardware. Up until 2019, the US military still used an 8-inch floppy disk as a core component of managing its nuclear weapons arsenal. The Japanese government still required floppies for some government administrative purposes as recently as two years ago, despite the fact the last major manufacturer of the disks (Sony) stopped producing them more than a decade earlier.

Though imperfect, floppies were relatively cheap and durable, which helped them gain mass adoption. Rather than invest the time and money required to retrofit older systems with new storage technologies, many institutions simply kept using floppies, hence their stubbornly long life spans.

But like any other magnetic storage medium, floppies degrade over time. Specifically, the iron oxide coating bound to the disk’s thin plastic film can break down when exposed to heat, humidity, or mold. As that coating deteriorates, the data encoded in its magnetic patterns can become unreadable. Left uncared for, an aging floppy’s memory may simply fade away.

Talboom and her colleagues quickly realized there wasn’t a one-size-fits-all solution for preserving the decades’ worth of material stored on the relics. The disks came in multiple form factors and were produced by many different manufacturers, often using incompatible formats and encoding methods. Imaging a floppy also requires specialized hardware (called a “floppy controller”) but a setup capable of reading one type of disk won’t necessarily work for another. Understanding which tool or process to use often meant diving deep into the history of floppy drive technology and combing through online forums, a process Talboom likens to “detective work.”

“At the time, I thought we were sorted,” Talboom says. “I was like, this has got to be easy, we figured out floppy disks.”

“Turns out they were a lot more complicated than I first saw, which is really fun,” she adds.

a collection of floppy disks — Floppies come in many different shapes and sizes, all of which require slightly different imaging processes. *Image: Courtesy of Leontien Talboom*

Luckily, the archivist wasn’t flying completely in the dark. While major manufacturers had largely stopped producing new floppy controllers, DIY versions persisted in retro gaming communities eager to preserve old games that existed only on floppy disks. Enthusiasts gave their creations colorful names like the “Catweasel” and its successor, the “Greaseweazle,” the latter of which became a mainstay in Talboom’s work. After speaking with some of the hobbyists, Talboom realized they were pursuing the same goal as digital archivists, preserving fragile digital history, just for different ends.

“These people have already invented the wheel,” Talboom says. “Let’s go and speak to them instead of trying to figure it out ourselves.”

The work to save the past

Imaging long-lost floppies isn’t a totally digital process. Sometimes, archivists have to get their hands dirty. Talboom says most of the disks in the Cambridge Library’s collection were donated, either by the families of deceased scholars or prominent individuals nearing the end of their lives. Those disks are usually tucked away in basements or garages where they’ve accumulated layers of mold and dust which need to be precisely cleaned before any imaging can occur. Those floppies might have labels written describing their contents, but that’s certainly not always the case. The labels also aren’t totally reliable. Floppy discs were often reused and written over, so just because one might have words “research notes” on it doesn’t necessarily guarantee that’s what’s hidden within.

“If we have a label that actually says anything about the contents on the disk, and in some cases, there’s nothing, there’s nothing, just a blank slate, which can make it very, very difficult,” Talboom says.

floppy disk degradation — This flux stream image of a floppy being imaged shows how small bits of mold can get dragged among the surface. *Image: Courtesy of Leontien Talboom*

Once cleaned, Talboom uses her utility belt of controllers to read the raw magnetic signals on the floppies. This process captures what’s called a “flux transition,” the tiny changes in magnetic polarity that encode the data. The controller interprets these fluctuations and reconstructs them into a format readable by modern software. Talboom says this process is relatively straightforward for more common 3.5-inch disks but becomes more challenging for older or unusual disks.

In some cases, floppies have experienced so much magnetic decay that their data is simply unrecoverable, though she says this has happened only a handful of times. The imaging process itself takes just a few moments because the amount of data stored on a floppy is minuscule compared with today’s hard drives.

What’s actually stored on the floppies Talboom has imaged? She couldn’t get too specific due to confidentiality, but says the content runs the gamut. The disks can contain everything from emails, downloaded internet forum content, early drafts of books, photos, and even 3D models. The library also notably hasn’t received many floppies from the 1990s, when the disks were at their peak use, which suggests they may have only just begun scratching the surface of what could be preserved.

“Anything that you can think of under the sun will show up on a floppy disc,” Talboom says. “I find that the most exciting thing.”

The project’s end date is bittersweet for Talboom. She says she’s grateful for the chance to bring communities together to save digital history, but she’ll also miss spending so much time with the aging plastic relics. While her primary work with them is coming to a close, it will be up to others to carry her research forward and ensure the history stored on the remaining floppies is preserved.

“[This project] very much showcases how important it is to talk with other communities, because we would have never as a community have figured out that that would be a good way of saving floppy disks,” she adds.