Re: Disk imaging

[Wayne Stewart <waynes@intergate.bc.ca>]

I personally think it's a tossup betweem Shrinkit and the Macintosh Disk Copy.
The nice thing about Disk Copy is you can produce disks on both a Mac and
an Apple II.
About 4 years ago I used ShrinkitGS to make disk images of the 500+ disk
ApplesBC IIgs library. Shrinkit balked at almost any kind of corruption.
Where upon I'd get to work with the disk utilities and usually manage to
resurect the files. The library went back to 1986 and I shudder to think how
many of those early disks had problems and how many hours I spent doing
repairs. While we still have the floppy disks, everything is also archived on CD.

Like yourself I found many very old disks still good while some newer ones
had problems. However the percentage of old disks with problems was far far
greater than the more recent ones.
Usually the first thing I tried with a problem disk was to make a bit copy of it.

That helped where the disk wasn't really corrupted but the patern was so weak
the IIgs had difficulty reading it.