legacy media and file formats
Sometimes people have precious documents stored on old floppy disks, which they would love to retrieve.
We have a really old computer that can read legacy floppy disks and extract ancient Word documents and other files, which otherwise would be lost to history.
No promises, doesn’t always work – but we can give it a try!
For example, my mother wrote her autobiography on an old Mac and we found the floppy disks in a drawer after her death, but our modern computer refused to recognize those disks, even with an external floppy disk drive. (The modern external floppy drive was just not the same as the old one and just could not read the older floppies.) What a great legacy we wanted to preserve and pass on!
I pulled out my old 1990s Mac laptop and its older design floppy disk reader was able to extract the files from the old floppies. (Wow, that tech from the 1990s was really sturdily constructed and still works!) Then we copied them onto newer media and into our cloud storage for posterity’s sake.
We also have legacy QuarkXPress programs that can open old QuarkXPress files and bring them up to date – and possibly convert them to InDesign files with use of additional specialized software. Let us know if you have some ancient QuarkXPress files of value you’d like to modernize for use today.
(By the way, why are they called “floppy” when they are in hard plastic covers? 🧐 Oh, the mysteries of the tech world!).
We can help you evaluate whether this is a worthwhile effort, or if files could be recreated from hard copy in a more cost-effective way, such as OCR scanning or other AI technology. Let us know if this obscure skill is of interest to you.