I have a bunch of old Mac floppies, from whatever System was common in 1995. I've been wanting to get this data off of these floppies for some time but feet dragging has led to the current state where powering up my two ancient Mac monitors resulted in distinctive frying electronics sounds and the old laptop I have won't start.
So I have the floppies. 🙂 A hundred or so of them, in fact.
I do not currently have a computer with a floppy drive. I could buy something, then figure out how to get all of the data off, then go through the old files and try to extract the text, but it seems like there's probably a company out there that can do this for me. Does anyone have any data retrieval experience, can you point me to a company who can get this data off of these floppies and even better convert the MacWrite and WordPerfect files to, well, anything modern?
Best Answer
It isn't that hard to do yourself.
Assuming these are physically standard 3.5" floppies, you can buy any USB floppy drive. The floppies are presumably formatted as HFS (the old Macintosh file system), which can be read under Linux.
Procedure
hfsutils
package (runsudo aptitude install hfsutils
).LibreOffice should be able to open WordPerfect files directly. I'm not sure about MacWrite.
If you want to archive the entire contents of the floppies, you can make an image of each floppy using
dd
.Edit: Spiff has a good point, that old floppies physically degrade. If you can only read them intermittently, try using
dd_rescue
/ddrescue
to get the data off the disks, and mount the images once safely on your hard drive.