HISTORY
Eight inches to three and a half
IBM began selling floppy drives in 1971. By 1986 a 3.5-inch disk in a plastic case held 1.44 megabytes.
Identify your diskA SHORT HISTORY, AND A RESCUE PLAN
Small disks,
long memories.
Many homes still have a box of floppy disks somewhere.
Identify your disk
COPY IT OFFbefore the drives are gone
- Know the size
- Store cool and dry
- Copy before it's too late
- Small habits, saved files
They held letters, school work, games and early digital photos. The disks may still be readable, but the drives that read them are getting scarce. Archivists say the safest move is to copy the files off before access is lost.
Updated
THE SHORT ANSWER
The disk may be fine.
The drive is the problem.
Floppy formats changed fast.
Each new size pushed the last one out.
OBSOLESCENCE
Drives disappear first
The Digital Preservation Coalition says losing access to hardware and software often happens long before the media itself deteriorates.
Why it matters
STORAGE
Cool, dry and clean
Keep magnetic media in a cool, dry, stable place, away from strong magnets, smoke and dust, and handle it as little as possible.
How to do itA QUICK DISK CHECK
Which floppy
have you found?
Pick a size to see when it appeared and what it held. The bar shows how specialised the equipment to read it has become, based on a national library's preservation lab.
Dates and capacities from IBM and Computer History Museum histories; equipment notes from the Library of Congress preservation blog (2021).
TWO NUMBERS WORTH KNOWING
Billions were made,
then they vanished.
One figure for the disks,
one for the drives that read them.
5 billion+
Floppy disks sold each year at the mid-1990s peak
IBM says more than 5 billion floppy disks were sold annually at their peak in the mid-1990s. By the mid-2000s, floppies had gone the way of the punched card.
DISKS · IBM
≈ 120 million
Floppy drives made per year at the 1990 peak
The Computer History Museum says floppy drive manufacturing peaked in 1990 at around 120 million units a year, then declined.
DRIVES · COMPUTER HISTORY MUSEUM
The Library of Congress says the vast majority of the hundreds of thousands of removable media items in its collections are optical disks and floppy disks.
FOUR STEPS FOR A BOX OF DISKS
Save the files,
not just the disks.
These steps draw on guidance written for archives, scaled down for a box found in a loft. For anything precious or badly damaged, specialist recovery services and archives have the right equipment.
Store them well for now
Keep disks somewhere cool, dry and stable, free of smoke and dust, and well away from strong magnets.
Handle them less
Every use adds wear. The aim is to read each disk once and work from the copy afterwards.
Copy them sooner, not later
Preservation guidance says recovering obsolete formats later is likely to be expensive compared with acting early.
Keep the label with the files
Library of Congress staff suggest scanning the disk and its sleeve or notes, keeping them with the copied files, and making more than one copy.
WHY DISKS FAIL
Dust, heads
and magnets.
The Digital Preservation Coalition says head and media crashes are one of the most common causes of damage to magnetic storage, and that smoke and debris can cause data loss because the heads sit so close to the surface. Poor storage can lead to oxidation or problems with the binding layer.
Magnets are less of a threat than people think: the handbook says damage from strong magnetic fields is rare and usually needs the magnet within about 50 mm. Archives make a disk image so the original only has to be read once, which spares both the disk and the equipment from repeated wear.
Questions
Questions people ask
When was the floppy disk invented?
An IBM team began work in 1967 on a way to load instructions and software updates into mainframe computers. IBM began selling floppy disk drives in 1971 and received patents for the drive and disk in 1972.
How much did a floppy disk hold?
The original 8-inch disk held the equivalent of 3,000 punched cards. The first 5.25-inch drive held 110 KB, and the 3.5-inch disk reached 1.44 MB.
Why can't I read my old floppy disks?
Often the problem is the drive, not the disk. Preservation guidance says losing access to hardware and software often happens long before the media itself deteriorates.
Will a magnet wipe a floppy disk?
It can, but the Digital Preservation Coalition says damage from strong magnetic fields is rare and usually requires the magnet to be within about 50 mm.
How do archives rescue floppy disks?
They make a disk image, a complete copy of the disk, so the original only needs reading once. The Library of Congress then explores the image to export files and check for personal information.