I can't afford an the recommended Applesauce for Apple II disk preservation so I'm hoping that the Adafruit work which added Apple II drive support will work for me.
Generally it's easier to just copy the data to each new media as you adopt it. In the past this was pretty easy to do as the hard drive held way more data than the floppy disks of old. The next hard drive was an order of magnitude larger than the old one, and so on. Unfortunately this sputtered out during the SSD transition and became even more ephemeral as people started putting data in the cloud where it will eventually be wiped when the accounts stop being paid or lost when the company goes under.
> The next hard drive was an order of magnitude larger than the old one, and so on.
Ah yes, the good old "old PC" folder that you would find on pretty much every Windows PC that used to have another "old PC" folder inside it somewhere, possibly inside an "external HDD (old)" folder :-)
Until the PC (or the HDD inside it) died surprisingly, people didn't have backups, or the backups turned out to be burned CDs that were scratched up and/or sat on a sun illuminated shelf for years.
I was at a class reunion a few years ago where it turned out, I was somehow the only one who still had (digital) photos from early-to-mid 2000s.
> ... even more ephemeral as people started putting data in the cloud where it will eventually be wiped when the accounts stop being paid or lost when the company goes under.
Or the photos they upload gradually degrade in quality as the company repeatedly plays with re-compressing stuff to squeeze more space out.
People have observed old (10+ years) photos on Google Drive to start getting blurry, having weird artifacts, color banding, etc... IIRC there was an article posted on HN at one point with some particular egregious examples. Techmoan also mentioned this in a video some time ago, commenting that the same thing happened to old YouTube uploads of his from the 2000s.
> when the company goes under
> when the accounts stop being paid
I've never experienced such case, did you?
Something much more likely is for a person to drop their phone into the toilet, buy a new one, and completely lose access to their only backup which is Google Photos, because they don't own a computer anymore and it is their only device.
Efficient market hypothesis applied to this topic would say that if you really do have a floppy, you should already have made a copy of it. If that’s Not the case, transform it to a punched card and be done with it.
The chance that one would have anything important on a floppy that is not already backed up in the year of 2026 must be close to zero.
https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_Floppy
Ah yes, the good old "old PC" folder that you would find on pretty much every Windows PC that used to have another "old PC" folder inside it somewhere, possibly inside an "external HDD (old)" folder :-)
Until the PC (or the HDD inside it) died surprisingly, people didn't have backups, or the backups turned out to be burned CDs that were scratched up and/or sat on a sun illuminated shelf for years.
I was at a class reunion a few years ago where it turned out, I was somehow the only one who still had (digital) photos from early-to-mid 2000s.
> ... even more ephemeral as people started putting data in the cloud where it will eventually be wiped when the accounts stop being paid or lost when the company goes under.
Or the photos they upload gradually degrade in quality as the company repeatedly plays with re-compressing stuff to squeeze more space out.
People have observed old (10+ years) photos on Google Drive to start getting blurry, having weird artifacts, color banding, etc... IIRC there was an article posted on HN at one point with some particular egregious examples. Techmoan also mentioned this in a video some time ago, commenting that the same thing happened to old YouTube uploads of his from the 2000s.
I've never experienced such case, did you?
Something much more likely is for a person to drop their phone into the toilet, buy a new one, and completely lose access to their only backup which is Google Photos, because they don't own a computer anymore and it is their only device.
At one point, I also had files on RapidShare. They probably weren't of any value, but I have no idea what they were now.
The chance that one would have anything important on a floppy that is not already backed up in the year of 2026 must be close to zero.