Overview
As Amiga users since 1986 and publishers of Amiga
Forever we understand how important it is for you to preserve your
digital past. Even if your Amiga computer is still working, your
floppy disks are aging and may soon become unreadable. We
recommend the following strategies and procedures for archiving
floppy disk data and keeping it accessible for future use.
Better Safe than Sorry
First of all, you need to decide what you wish to archive. As
always, keep in mind "Murphy's Laws Applied to Amiga Floppy
Disks":
- Sooner or later (usually sooner) your aging floppy disks
will become unreadable.
- If you have a lot of disks and opt for a partial archive of
your disks (rather than archiving all of your disks), you will never again find the time and will to
archive the remaining disks.
- By the time you realize that you need something which you
originally decided not to archive, it will have become
unreadable.
- If you did not backup your archive, not only will all of
your original disks have become unreadable, but you will also
lose all your archived disks.
- If you are hoping that some future technology will be able
to read your unreadable Amiga floppy disks, you will lose your
disks (and patience) before such technology is ready.
- If you are hoping that your old Amiga computer will still be
there in the near future to transfer your Amiga disks to the PC
via Amiga Explorer, the Amiga will cease to function the next
time you switch it on.
Options
Once you have put together all your disks you need to decide how to store the data in a
format which can be accessed on the system where the emulation is
running. Whatever work you will decide to do, this will also be a
good opportunity to both reorganize and back up your data.
If you decide to maintain the original floppy disk-based
organization you may want to mark each floppy disk with a unique
number or other short reference ID, so that you can quickly match
each physical disk to the corresponding disk image file or
directory after the transfer.
If you only need to convert a few Amiga disks, you may want to
consider Cloanto's
data
conversion service instead of doing the work yourself.
As you probably know, Amiga floppy
disks cannot be read on the PC without additional hardware.
For this reason, we recommend the following procedures to archive
your floppy disk data, in order of preference:
- For disks containing games, check first if the game is already
available in a downloadable format (see the Amiga
Forever Game Downloads page,
or do a Google or other search engine search with keywords like "Game
Name ADF").
- If you can burn a CD-ROM on your Amiga, or if you can access
your Amiga hard disk from the PC (e.g. with
Amiga
Explorer or another networking option),
reorganize as much of the floppy disk-based data to a directory
structure on the hard disk or CD-ROM, and use that to copy the
data to the PC.
- If your PC is equipped with special hardware to read amiga
disks, such as a Catweasel PCI board,
then use that to archive your remaining Amiga floppy disks.
- If you have an Amiga (with a Workbench disk to boot from),
or can borrow one, connect it to the PC by using a
null-modem serial cable, and use
Amiga
Explorer to drag-and-drop the ADF images of your remaining
floppy disks from the Amiga to the PC.
Speed vs. Cost
Archiving all your Amiga disks can be a lot of work, and may
take hours if not days. Unfortunately, due to the deteriorating
condition of aging floppy disks, and because the Amiga floppy disk
format is not supported by today's standard hardware (and is
likely to be even less supported in the future), it is better to
do this sooner than later.
If your Amiga has a hard disk it is in general faster to first
transfer the Amiga floppy disk data to the Amiga itself, copying either
the files and directories or the disk images to the hard disk,
than transferring each disk individually to the PC. Once you have
all the data on the hard disk, it only takes a single
drag-and-drop with Amiga Explorer (even if the actual transfer
takes an entire night), or burning a CD-ROM, to copy the data to
the PC in one step.
Reading an Amiga floppy disk by using the Catweasel board from
inside the emulation is in general faster than copying the same
disk via Amiga Explorer over a serial link (which is the
bottleneck). Amiga Explorer over TCP/IP (e.g. over Ethernet) is
several times faster than a serial connection (in this case the
bottleneck is the Amiga floppy hardware).
In spite of its relatively low speed, an Amiga Explorer
Amiga-PC connection over a standard null-modem serial cable
remains the simplest, least expensive and most effective way to
transfer the content of a limited number of floppy disks to the
PC.
Additional Tips
Do not underestimate the usefulness of downloadable game disk
images which are available from legal Amiga emulation sites. These games usually have copy protection removed (with
permission from the publishers), are in a format tested to be run
in the emulation, and they often come with configuration
instructions. The Amiga Forever
Game
Downloads page includes a variety of sites hosting disk images of
famous Amiga games, as well as other software.
Whenever you copy data from one medium or computer to another,
verify the integrity of the copy. For example, you can use a tool
like
DirDiff
(switch off the Quick option) to double-check the data. DirDiff is
included in Amiga Forever.
You can create ADF disk image files of your Amiga floppy disks
on the Amiga itself, by using the Transdisk tool, which is included with Amiga Forever.
The command line syntax is:
transdisk >RAM:001.adf -h
where "RAM:001.adf" is a sample destination file name.
If you are using optical media (CD-ROMs or DVDs) for long term storage, consider that
the declared shelf life does not take into account daily
temperature fluctuations, which may result in small cracks which
can significantly shorten the life expectancy of the medium.
Rather than storing your media in a room with heating or other
day/night temperature fluctuations, keep them in a cellar or
similar environment having a more stable temperature. For
long-term storage we recommend using DVDs (rather than CDs) with no label
attached.
The Data Sharing and
Migration Tips tutorials include
additional information and links covering the transfer of non-floppy
disk data (e.g. from a hard disk, a ZIP disk, etc.) from the Amiga
to the PC.
Related Links
