Comment by retrac
You might be able to use that old floppy drive. But you won't be able to use that old Pentium machine the drive is in.
Because you will need several hundred gigabytes of RAM and a very fast IO bus.
The gold standard today for archiving magnetic media is to make a flux image.
The media is treated as if it were an analog recording and sampled at such a high rate that the smallest details are captured. Interpretation is done later, in software. The only antique electronics involved are often the tape or drive head, directly connected to a high speed digitizer.
And indeed that appears to be the plan Al Kossow has for the tape: https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2025-November/032765.htm...
As for CDs, I don't see the rush; the ones that were properly made will likely outlast human civilization.
> As for CDs, I don't see the rush; the ones that were properly made will likely outlast human civilization.
Printed ones will last a lot more, but writable ones will degrade to unreadable state in a few years. I lost countless of them years ago, including the double backup of a project I worked on. Branded disks written and verified, properly stored, no sunlight, no objects or anything above them, no moisture or whatever. All gone just because of time. As I read other horror stories like mine, I just stopped using them altogether and never looked back.