In mid-late 90s, when floppy disks were not dead yet, I used to help my father to extract lots of files from their devices to floppy disks. They were using floppy disks only because an application that they were using to extract and convert data from their devices was designed to only copy files in chunks to floppy disks.<p>One day, out of curiosity, I opened every single file of the application that they were using to convert and extract data to see if I could make sense of anything. I accidentally found out that there was a config file that had a destination path for copying converted files. It was hard coded to drive A (floppy drive).<p>I changed the path, tested the application, and it worked. I shared the trick with my father and he shared it with his organization. He became the employee of the year for that discovery.<p>Floppy disks were expensive on the scale that they were using them, and they often had to deal with a lot of data loss accidents. Their IT team even had a data recovery team specialized to recover data from broken floppy disks because usually it meant they had to send a team back to redo the work.
The storage on the devices they were using was very limited, so often during their week-long operations, they had to extract data before they could continue their work, only to realize later that some chunks were missing from the first part, and then they had to redo that part of operation again.
BusinessInsider, October 2021, "The Japanese government is still trying to phase out floppy disks a decade after Sony stopped making them"<p><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/japan-government-tokyo-floppy-disks-still-trying-to-phase-out-2021-10?op=1" rel="nofollow">https://www.businessinsider.com/japan-government-tokyo-flopp...</a>
<i>The Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) has lost two floppy disks containing personal information on 38 people</i><p>Amateurs. In the USA we can do that kind of thing for 38 million people. with the advances in private sector we're on track to do so for 3.8 billion any day now.
> According to the MPD's third organized crime control division, the names, dates of birth, and sex of 38 men<p>Looks like they leaked their sex a second time.
Just last year we got documentation for a self-driving car project from a japanese OEM on a DVD. Hilarity ensued, I remember IT running around like a headless chicken trying to find a reader, then trying to buy one, then trying friends and family.
I use floppy disks for my Akai S2800 sampler :)
Originally built around 1992 it still works (and sounds) great!
Modding it to support USB is too expensive, and I quite enjoy some of the limitations it brings. You have to get creative for some things.
Wouldn't it be interesting if the floppy disks lost were 2.88MB and also only commonly readable in japan, where that rare format of drive was very slightly more popular in the mid 1990s.
I wouldn't worry. Everybody knows that floppy disks are used to safely watch solar eclipses. Nobody would plug them into ancient computers expecting to find some data there.
you think this is bad? <a href="https://ocrportal.hhs.gov/ocr/breach/breach_report.jsf" rel="nofollow">https://ocrportal.hhs.gov/ocr/breach/breach_report.jsf</a>
Will we pretend that the usage of floppy disks is normal in almost 2022? Or perhaps the news value comes from this fact, but then, they don't make any comment on it... Weird.<p>I also love that they seem to be taking this seriously, even when it's just 38 people, while all over the world, governments (cough Turkey cough) don't even apologize when they leak the personal details of ALL of their citizens. Well.
Norwegian Health Department sent floppies to doctors until 2016 on a large scale. See <a href="https://gundersen.net/functional-floppy-disks-in-2015/" rel="nofollow">https://gundersen.net/functional-floppy-disks-in-2015/</a>
I still use floppies a lot. I know, why? Well there is a lot of hardware from the 80's and 90's that, unlike simple PCs, does not really obsolete.* I know this affects a lot of areas, but mine is synthesizers and samplers. Synths allows you to save sounds you created or banks of sounds, and depending on the synth, possibly other things. Samplers recorded short snippets of digital audio and then allows you to place that sound in a configuration that allowed you to play it like a synthesizer.<p>Fortunately, most synths no longer really need the floppy since most of what it gets you is easily replaced with MIDI SYSEX, and dump requests. Samplers on the other hand, while many did implement MIDI SDS, dumping digital audio at 31.25kbps is an exercise in boredom. Some of the later samplers have SCSI, so saving off to SD cards is easy (thanks to the SCSI2SD boards) but for some, I still have to save off to floppy.<p>* While there are newer devices of this type available without the floppy dependancy, each musical instrument is a unique creation with its own sound, so just because there is something new it doesn't mean that new thing is a replacement for the original thing (just as a trumpet isn't a relacement for a violin.)
not just problematic because of the data on them, but if they keep losing them they might also run out of floppy disks for their day to day business, since they've been out of production for a decade
I am disappointed by all the comments being focused on the use of floppy disks, as opposed to questions about whether contents on these removable media were encrypted. Even the original news article doesn't mention what are the data security practices employed by these agencies, other than the physical storage was locked.
Linux officially dropped support for floppy disk drives: <a href="https://techreport.com/news/3464145/linux-dropping-floppy-drive-support/" rel="nofollow">https://techreport.com/news/3464145/linux-dropping-floppy-dr...</a><p>Why are they still using that?
Reminds me of 2 random tidbits on Japanese culture [1] Hanko [2] Fax Machines<p>Hanko are the red stamps that people require for official paperwork. Fax machines are still in vogue, probably related to the fact that Hanko are needed to complete official paperwork.<p>[1] <a href="https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/hanko/" rel="nofollow">https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/hanko/</a>
[2] <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/07/japanese-fax-fans-rally-to-defence-of-much-maligned-machine" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/07/japanese-fax-f...</a>
> According to the MPD's third organized crime control division, the names, dates of birth, and sex of 38 men in their 20s to 80s who had applied for Meguro Ward-run housing were recorded on the floppy disks. None of them were apparently affiliated with gangs.<p>Putting aside the "floppy disk" question, I have to say they seem a hella lot more polite and regretful for the lost data than the constant and more extreme breaches and loss of PII that seem to get stolen regularly here in the U.S. Equifax?
I did an MRI a while ago, and waited for 20 minutes for the images to be burnt on a CD so that I could physically bring it to my doctor. I thought that was archaic.
Haven't seen a floppy disk for 20 years. Haven't seen an 8" floppy since about 1988.<p>Floppies got bitrot quite badly; I doubt they're readable without forensic equipment (come to think of it, even without the bitrot, equipment for reading floppies isn't common).