Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472 with a side project of the week. Let’s get started!
The process of archival maintenance can be tedious and repetitive. As disk formats change, it becomes harder to locate adapters for disks with old connection standards. For today’s project, I worked with a USB floppy reader.
It all started when my mother’s Designer Ruby embroidery machine wasn’t as broken as she thought. The machine is quite old by this point, and while discussing what thumb drives we might have that aren’t too big for it to see, my father and I were quickly able to trial an SD card over an adapter (didn’t work) and an external 3¼ floppy disk reader. It wasn’t long before we were pouring over a stash of floppies from a previous embroidery machine and rediscovering old patterns.
My mother spent an afternoon copying the archive to a thumb drive, but a few files were appearently corrupt. I tried to access them on Linux, but the floppy drive was making an unusual pattern of sounds as it accessed the first trouble file. Instead, I very carefully crafted a dd command to dump the contents to an image in my Downloads directory. I repeated the process for each floppy, then mounted it into my file system for extraction.
Out of curiosity, I looked up how it was possible for a user to mount a USB stick if Linux is running mount, a privileged command, underneath the graphics. Long story short, I saw it before while researching an open source driver for our uninterruptible power supplies. Daemons are a type of privileged program that can act on behalf of an underprivileged program without giving it wide, open access to root level permissions. Udisksctl is one such command line utility.
Mounting the disk images proved problematic, producing several errors. Assuming they were permissions related, I tried using udiskctl to mount them as myself instead of root, but instead renamed them with .img and mounted them with Dolphin, a graphical file manager. Turns out the errors really were badly corrupted files, and they still refused to copy out of the disk images, even with the correct permissions. At least it was cleaner this way.
I originally thought I had saved around three of the nine missing files, but one or two of the recovered ones turned upon inspection. I am happy to report that I was able recover the one pattern my mother wanted most. The entire archive will soon end up on GoldenOakLibry, my family’s network storage.
Takeaway
The possibility remains that further attempts at recovery may be viable. Given that the bulk of the collection was archived successfully before I got involved, I will have to ask her if the last few patterns are worth it. In any case, it was nice seeing some of those patterns I remember being stitched out by machine all those years ago. It reminds me of 3D printing in the present day.
Final Question
Have you ever dealt with aging technology to move an archive forward in terms of technological time?
I look forward hearing your answers on in the comments below or on my Discord server.