And nothing makes your heart sink faster than the rhythmic sound of trying over and over to read the same bad disk.

The wisdom of 1990s was that if you have one copy of data on your disk, you may as well have zero copies.

It became more pronounced in late 1990s when disks became more ubiquitous and the race for the lower price likely made them less reliable.

After that the idea of backing things up, no matter where they are recorded initially, feels very natural.

That's still the wisdom.

The 3-2-1 backup rule: keep at least 3 copies of your data on at least 2 storage media, and keep at least 1 copy offsite.

> The wisdom of 1990s was that if you have one copy of data on your disk, you may as well have zero copies.

Still true.

Along similar lines: If you haven't tested or dry-run your restore procedures, you may as well not have backups either.

That applies more for things like SQL databases and the like, more than personal files on disk. But yeah.... if you haven't tried to restore your database or other data repository from a backup file that you've squirreled away, then you effectively don't have a backup either.

I’d slightly amend the analogy into “an untested backup is akin to having a lottery ticket for your backups”. Maybe you win or maybe you don’t.

Old floppies are also like lottery tickets in that sense.

Once my family drove to visit my cousins. I brought a newly bought box of floppies just in case they had some interesting things to copy from... and forgot it in the car with summer heatwave outside. It was a very painful lesson, so many badblocks.

I didn't know the temperature mattered?

Otherwise with new floppies I always reformatted and checked for bad blocks first. Some of the series were very bad quality.

nah, some just melted. It was on the front seat with no shadow in Israeli +40C degrees heat.

This, and the click of death coming from a Zip disk that meant 100MB of Something Important had just entered Valhalla.

Especially post-pandemic when most of the stuff in the theater is dead and there's only a single backup of the lighting board programming on a 3.5" floppy with a broken dust protector. Manually spinning it and blowing the dust out brought it back enough to save it after our first improv jam that took place with fluorescents on for the first 15 minutes while I manually programmed a single wash on a dimmer.

ddrescue trying to read a scratched DVD from a public library comes close. Horrifying sounds as you contemplate your drive wearing itself down, copy progress ETA 47:32:13

The secret for scratched CDs/DVDs I learned way too late in the game was that you can actually polish the clear plastic underside with Brasso (brass polish) and a lens cloth. I restored sooo many optical discs this way. It really works!

At that moment, I took the knife next to the computer to insert gently the blade into the drive above the diskette. It worked most of the time :p.

Glad to hear I'm not the only one who routinely stabbed my computer! I used to keep a butter knife by my iMac to help eject CDs. I had the first slot-loading model and the rubber eject rollers they used seemed to lose their grip after a while.

Especially when you're on floppy #25 of OS/2 Warp.

I recall installing Office from ~35 floppy discs, and finding that one of the discs in the 20s was unreadable after what felt like an eternity. The installation still completed after I skipped it though, so presumably it only contained some optional feature I never ended up using.

A friend of mine had his first job installing Oracle from floppies. I'm not sure what the actual count was, but we would joke about him installing disk 1 of 99...

First job I had was installing SCO off tapes and that was the year 2000

Thanks, that brought back a vivid memory I didn't even know was still knocking around my brain!

Or floppy #10 of Mark of the Unicorn’s DAW.

Nervous times they were!

Yeah, that, "Any second it will give up and shoot the disk back out" thought.

tik tik tik tik tik

That 'stutter-of-failure' :D

Abort, Retry, Fail?

With CP/M if you left the door open all your work was lost like tears in the rain.

The 5 1/4 disks, IMO, had a superior kinesthetic. A much more solid thunk sound when being inserted and a deeper tone while being read.

Enjoy, the sounds of floppies :D [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnFQZa8SKP8

The ones that I remember had a locking lever which barely made any sound at all.

https://i.stack.imgur.com/8D9f1.jpg

Some of em were spring loaded to where if it got past halfway it'd snap shut all the way. Flicking one of those makes a good noise.

Ah, but 8" floppies made better frisbees - personal experience :)

I used to work in the disk duplication industry, both at a copier (DisCopyLabs) and then later at the robot manufacturer, Mountain Computer, which was eventually bought by Nakamichi and combined with Trace, our competitor.

We used to be able to sail those suckers over the building on Wyatt Drive to the San Thomas Expressway... Next person to work on roof equipment probably had a curious experience, many discs that did not make it all the way likely scattered all over the roof.

The seeking at 1:48[1] sounds like Hall and Oates[2].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnFQZa8SKP8&t=108s

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kY27wmTZwyg

The 8 inchers were a nightmre in some mechanisms (whichever ones Intel used in their MDS systems); slide 'em in too quickly and with a bit of passion (!?) and they'd catch on something, so if you weren't paying attention you'd fold them over and make a crease. Bye bye data!

True. I'd put it on the same level as connecting XLR cables. MiniDiscs (and to a lesser extent) UMDs were maybe the last examples of such satisfying mechanics.

We are moving towards a solid state future where no user interaction directly drives mechanics. Physical media has largely disappeared, few cars are sold with a manual transmission and everything is wireless.

Maybe folding phones will fill the gap. For now, at least my toaster remains!

> Nothing in modern computing compares to the audible...

Ahem, cough, dial-up modem handshake.

That is all I have to say on the subject.

> In modern computing

Surely the floppy disk is not more modern than the modem? They started to die around the same time, if I recall.

Both are not modern. I don't think the original post was trying to imply that floppies are modern.

Agreed, I remember dial up using an AOL CD. And CDR was around the corner.

How about the constant fan noise when having ESET [0] installed on a Windows laptop then?

[0] if you don't have ESET at hand, I guess any "good" antivirus would do.

Bah - font kerning issue (keeming).

I've thought the same thing about those big power switches on AT and older motherboards/power supplies where you actually shut the power off.

Modern computers are so silent that you have no idea whether they're working hard or it's just someone doing things on the UI thread that don't belong there.

Maybe the pinging of a modem? You can tell from the tune how well it is doing!

Not even a modem handshake noise?

I wish my wifi had those. So I could know instantly if the connection is going to work or if I need to change spot.

For a second, I read 'wife' not 'wifi', and thought it was a lead in to marital harmony(or not).

I also really liked the audible and kinesthetic satisfaction of the 5.25 floppies.