How much time do you spend with actual floppies?

[Weasel Fierce]

Not gonna do a poll, I am just curious.

When working with real hardware

How much time do you spend handling actual floppies vs using something like a gotek or hard drive installs?

[jPV]

None. Haven't been using floppies since 1993 or so when I got my A1200 with an HD. Floppies were left on A500 times. I think I've never booted anything from a floppy on A1200. I've used RAD: to write floppy images if needed to install something always..

[jotd]

floppies suck and are unreliable specially after 30 years. Plus running everything using whdload so the answer is zero.

[rabidgerry]

Well this is just it. I have been debating for over a year now on whether or not to put in a gotek drive into my main A1200. I still feel like I need to keep the disk drive despite never using it. It's very rare I need to use it, and to be honest it would save a bit of space putting the gotek in but I'm still sitting on this even though I have the gotek, the OLED, the bracket the sound kit. I dunno.

So time on floppies is probably about 1% of my Amiga time throughout the year.

I am going to guess some people are floppy disk diehards still.

[Weasel Fierce]

Originally Posted by rabidgerry

Well this is just it. I have been debating for over a year now on whether or not to put in a gotek drive into my main A1200. I still feel like I need to keep the disk drive despite never using it. It's very rare I need to use it, and to be honest it would save a bit of space putting the gotek in but I'm still sitting on this even though I have the gotek, the OLED, the bracket the sound kit. I dunno.

So time on floppies is probably about 1% of my Amiga time throughout the year.

I am going to guess some people are floppy disk diehards still.

I had that exact debate for a while. I ended up not regretting it at all and ironically I use the gotek more now than I ever did use the physical drive.

[phx]

Not much. Most software tests on real hardware are done via ethernet and hard disk.

Unless I develop a new game. Then the ADF has to be written to floppy disk and tested from it (although most testing can be emulated).

[Mas21]

I've been using only floppy disks the last 3 years in my A500. whatever game I want, I buy a box and moreover I write some of them on diskettes when i have time. I have gotek somewhere but i think i don't remember how use it after those years

[Nobby_UK]

Mostly Gotek & Whdload files.

I have 30 odd blanks in front of me now ---
Same as last year

[khph_re]

Tons, my A1200 sound went ages ago.
A mate gave me an A500, so i watch demos and play games on that. I use the 1200 for applications.

[Bruce Abbott]

I use floppies all the time.

I back up source code onto them, then take them with me when I go out. You never know what might happen while you are away (burglary, house burns down...).

I also use them for running games and other stuff distributed in adf format, both on the A1200 and A500. Can't beat that for a full retro experience!

Of course I also have a few original disks (games, apps, magazine disks, development stuff) that I load up occasionally.

Using good quality disks is just as important today as it was 'back in the day'. The cheap floppies most people bought were often faulty right out of the box. Add a few years of use and 20 years of storage in damp conditions and the failure rate goes up dramatically. I bought 100 disks from a former A500 owner and half of them were bad. I managed to fix a few by taking the disk out of the sleeve and cleaning it thoroughly, but it was too much work.

So I trolled eBay for high quality still sealed in the box disks, and got 30 Fuji Film disks (same ones I used to sell in my shop back in the 90's). More recently I picked up a box of 10 Sony disks, which aren't quite as good as Fuji but still acceptable. So now I have 40 good quality disks to work with. Should last a while...

BTW I also use floppy disks on retro PCs. I have one 'modern' PC with a 3.5" floppy drive to put stuff onto floppies for the old machines. One of my PCs has 720k drives, so I tend to use DD disks on PCs too. I only use crappy old Amiga disks for that though, PCs don't deserve the good ones!

[Karlos]

@Bruce Abbot

I use floppies all the time.

I back up source code onto them, then take them with me when I go out. You never know what might happen while you are away (burglary, house burns down...).

Damn, that is some dedication to the old media. Aren't they getting somewhat hard to source now?

What's your opinion on services like GitHub, GitLab etc? Not sure about the latter, but you can have private repositories on GitHub as a single noncommercial user these days. I used to run a subversion server on my PC and back up over the LAN anything being worked on on the Amiga or A1 machines. I learned a painful lesson when that HD died. I'd only booted the the bloody thing that day in order to specifically back it up to my external backup.

I reassessed my obsession with privacy and decided GitHub was the way to go. Now, some of my code is in the arctic code vault. Shame I'd not noticed that coming, I might've pushed something useful for the post apocalypse.

[Weasel Fierce]

Theres still a lot of NOS floppies for sale online and there are some services that cater to legacy business needs.
People who are determined to have a supply would probably do well to stock up before its too late though.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Weasel Fierce

Theres still a lot of NOS floppies for sale online and there are some services that cater to legacy business needs.

I know only one online store that actually still has NOS DD floppies. Maybe we could gather all sources for them in this thread? Here's the one I know of: https://www.floppydisk.com/

[Weasel Fierce]

Originally Posted by TCD

I know only one online store that actually still has NOS DD floppies. Maybe we could gather all sources for them in this thread? Here's the one I know of: https://www.floppydisk.com/

Theres a fair amount on US amazon but itd be good to have a list of retailers that has them regularly as opposed to random one offs.

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by khph_re

Tons, my A1200 sound went ages ago.
A mate gave me an A500, so i watch demos and play games on that. I use the 1200 for applications.

Have you checked the -12v rail on the PSU for the A1200? If that goes, it badly impacts audio (serial too, though it depends on how strict the attached devices are on correct signalling levels).

[Predseda]

Several times per year, maybe twice? Three times?

[tero]

For games I use floppies as much as i can, as long as the disks swaps are bearable. Seeing that i have an a1200 that is only with a handfull of games. The rest is Installed on HD and a few WHD installs.
Everything non-games is installed anyway.

[Matt_H]

Mostly I just use them when I'm ripping ADFs of old disks, but occasionally I need to sneakernet files from a networked machine to a non-networked machine. All of my Amigas have their original floppy drives and I don't own a Gotek or other floppy emulator; when I do need to use "disks" it's usually via diskimage.device.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Karlos

What's your opinion on services like GitHub, GitLab etc? Not sure about the latter, but you can have private repositories on GitHub as a single noncommercial user these days.

Apart from the uneasiness of relying on a 'virtual' online repository, would I be able to access it from my A1200?

Last year I was struggling make ends meet and so decided to kill my personal website (which only had a storage capacity of 100MB). Soon after I received an email from the hosting service saying that they were closing down and another provider would contact me. I need to chase that up because they had a much better deal.

My plan was to use Github instead. But now - after receiving emails from people asking what happened to my old website - I am thinking of creating another one (this time putting a bit more effort into maintaining it).

I used to run a subversion server on my PC and back up over the LAN anything being worked on on the Amiga or A1 machines. I learned a painful lesson when that HD died.

Yep - never trust a PC hard drive (can't count the number that have died on me). I have backups of my Amiga stuff duplicated on several hard drives in PCs, plus archival backups on DVDs. But to make regular backups I would need to have a PC running. By the time my 'server' PC has booted I could have already saved my work on a floppy.

I reassessed my obsession with privacy and decided GitHub was the way to go. Now, some of my code is in the arctic code vault. Shame I'd not noticed that coming, I might've pushed something useful for the post apocalypse.

Sounds super secure. But how will you get it out after the apocalypse?

[xc8]

@Bruce

What about getting a NAS, for local internet you can get an old one but insulate it from the internet.

Alternative an SBC (rpi etc) . I ve killed my personal website years ago, then moved it on a rpi zero w, I just pay for the domain name, there are free servers for DDNS -I am on static IP anyway.