Apple II floppy archiving notes

[fadden@netcom.com (Andy McFadden)]

During the past week I finally got around to doing something that I've
been meaning to do for several years: archive my entire collection of
5.25" Apple II disks.  After several long hours, I have completed the
task, and thought the results might be interesting.

The approach I took was:

 - Use ShrinkIt to create a disk image of the 5.25" disk.  The images were
   written to a ProDOS disk partition on the hard drive.
 - Transfer the files from the IIgs to Linux over AppleShare.
 - Use UNIX tools (e.g. nulib) to verify that the disk images are valid.

I transferred in this manner 499 sides of floppies.  That's nearly 300
individual disks, most of which are double-sided.  Uncompressed, that
represents a capacity of 68MB; after ShrinkIt compression, it occupied
36MB.  It's somewhat disconcerting to think that, after taking all the data
on every 5.25" disk I own, I'm looking for other stuff to include with it
so I don't waste tons of space writing it to a CD-ROM. :-)

Some disks, such as those with minor copy protection, couldn't be copied.
Of those, I think only Microsoft's Olympic Decathalon will be missed -- and
I'm guessing that's probably available on an archive site somewhere.  (If
not, I'll try to make a nibbilized image... the game is a classic.)

Of those 499 images, 25 failed during the imaging process due to sector
errors (5% failure rate).  Some of these disks date back to early 1981,
so it's fairly impressive that *one* bad sector would be detected on only
5% of the images.  In only two cases did a disk have a bad sector on
both sides, so it's not simply a question of inferior media.  In a couple
of cases there were multiple bad sectors on a single track.

These failures were dealt with on a case-by-case basis.  Most seemed to
happen on track 0 or track 35, so in many cases (disks with DOS or ProDOS
on them) no important data was lost, though the disk couldn't be booted.
Generally, "init" from the Bag of Tricks was used to stomp on the wayward
sector.  (I think Locksmith 6.0 had a nicer error-recovery feature, but
I didn't have that, and nothing that died was really worth the trouble...
I got lucky on the disks that matter most to me.)


The moral of the story is: if you've been saying to yourself, "gee, one of
these days I should go do something with all those old Apple II floppies",
you might want to do something about it soon.  15+ years is a long time for
magnetic media, and some of them are starting to give up the ghost...

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