On 8/11/17 10:58 AM, Marvin Johnston via cctalk wrote:
I have probably at least 10,000 floppy disks of many flavors (formats,
hard sector, soft sector, various TPI and Tracks/disk, 3.5"/5.25?/8",
etc.)
I've been thinking about this, and you need to organize what you want to
read and get this down to something you can do in your lifetime. I'm
guessing I've only read a few thousand disks in fifteen years. I think
the fastest I've processed a disk was still around 5 minutes a disk. It
can quickly go much higher if any work has to be done on the physical
media and especially if there are media retrys.
The problem will be the workflow. If you are really lucky, you might be
able to get a few systems running in parallel but in practice they need
to be watched and the heads cleaned frequently. I can only stand doing
this for maybe a week or two of full-time work at a reading station.
The fastest way to deal with metadata is bundling like media types
together, put a reference number near the label, scan the disk label
(and things like paper directory listings) on a flatbed, use that number
for the file name, do a batch, rinse lather repeat. If you're using
Imagedisk, don't bother adding the tag when you read it, reconcile it
with the scanned label in batches later, if at all.
I do the reading on a separate machine from where the data is archived
and shuttle it over on a thumb drive, then put the scans and images
together into directories by project/system name number date. Then after
I can't stand dealing with reading disks any more, I reconcile what I've
done that day (or past couple of days)
