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We're going to assume you're just trying to take a pile of disks from however far back and transfer the data onto something more recent.

Storage could make a huge difference in the lifespan of Floppies, and a pile of disks put inside a box that was stored in a low humidity, non-extreme-temperature environment could last a lot longer than a floppy used constantly that was left on top of a computer monitor for weeks. Some aspects changed - where 8" and 5 1/4" discs had no built-in protection for the magnetic face of the disc except a paper cover, the 3 1/2" versions had a small spring-loaded door that was opened by the disk drive.

In the late 1980s, 3 1/2" overtook 5 1/4" as the dominant format, but a lot of machines, such as the Commodore 64, Atari 810, IBM PC, Kaypro, Apple II and II, and a range of others all supported the 5 1/4" primarily.Īll floppies work on the same principle: a magnetic disc with a hole in the middle is inside a case, and a disk drive reads the magnetic data off the disc. There are three different main sizes of floppy disks that had the most traction:Ĩ" floppies fell out of favor relatively quickly in favor of the 5 1/4" versions. None of these options should be considered endorsements, and Archive Team does not earn commission from the sale of these items. If any of these options seem daunting, a number of people have offered to accept floppy disks and pull the data using these tools. This page is meant to be a clearinghouse for various options that a person or group of reasonable technical ability could use to rescue data from floppy disks. That said, a situation now exists where there are millions of these things out in the world, some of them containing rare or unusual pieces of history, and so there's a lot of benefit to getting all that old data off that medium.

The USB stick, wireless access, the use of the internet, and a whole other range of options have rendered this medium obsolete. While they were cool-looking, convenient and even somewhat inexpensive after a while, Floppy Disks are out as a medium to store data on home computers.