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How can I retrieve data from my old 3 1/4 inch floppies?
Tuesday, December 15, 2009 / Backups
Hi Jacob,
In the late 1980s/early 1990s I was teaching space technology in England. The school used ONLY Macintosh computers. When I came back to the states I had to buy a PC/IBM and gave away my Mac. Now I have 100+ 3 1/4 floppies that I’m desperate to retrieve my engineering drawings and other documents from.
How do I solve this problem? The iMac computers today don’t even have a 3 1/4 drive port. Can you give me some advice?
- Tom
After you copy those over to your hard drive, keep a copy on your hard drive and burn an archive copy to CD or DVD. Make sure to keep the archive copy someplace safe. The floppy disks will fail over time. The bigger issue will be in reading those drawing files if they are in a proprietary format. I was a big Claris CAD user in my school days and have many of my house blueprints saved in that CAD file format. I keep a copy of Claris Cad running on Mini VMac so that I can read them and create new drawings. It will seem strange, but I have yet to find a modern CAD program to replace Claris CAD.
Check it out and let me know if it works for your files.
- Jacob
December 20th, 2009 at 5:21 pm
Did I miss something? The first question is – HOW do you copy a 3-1/4 floppy to the hard drive of a computer that does not have a floppy drive. What external hard drive would you recommend to connect to the computer – to enable copying these particular floppies to computer?
December 24th, 2009 at 11:41 pm
All generations of iMac, of course, do not have floppy drives. It is very likely that these Claris CAD files are stored on 800K (double-sided) floppies, which can only be read on the special drives that were commonplace in Macintosh systems.
If the disks are the 1.4 MB (high-density) kind, then a modern USB floppy drive should read them. If you have an external USB floppy drive (typically by Imation or VST), an 800K floppy disk will usually give an error and the computer will ask to format it. Again, this is assuming you are using a newer Macintosh which can mount HFS volumes. In essence, only an Apple disk drive in an old-world Macintosh will read these disks. Then the files can be converted and copied to 1.4 MB disks that modern drives can read.
Last of all, Claris CAD files are forked, which can result in corruption if used on a non-Macintosh system. I would use Claris Graphics Translator to convert the files to Autocad DXF with which modern programs play nicely.