A recent project has allowed National Archives to access and work towards preserving the contents of 30-year-old floppy disks.

National Archives holds a massive 4.5 petabytes of digital records. This includes items from our collection that have been digitised from physical formats like paper, photographs and film, and ‘born digital’ collections. Some of these born digital records are held on obsolete digital carries – also called legacy media - such as floppy disks, magnetic tapes and data cassettes.

Digital records require special care due to their fragility. Technology and software used to view digital records can quickly become difficult to obtain, maintain and run. The digital files that make up a record can become inaccessible due to storage failures, software errors, corruption over time, and many other factors.

Obsolete carriers are even more at risk because they can physically degrade over time, and need specialised hardware to access. When was the last time you saw a floppy disk drive?

This isn't an archives exclusive problem. It's likely that some of your treasured memories such as family videos, photos and documents could be stored on older formats like CD ROMs, DVDs or other carriers. While these are not yet obsolete, they are becoming harder to access and use.

The Aboriginal Population Register from 1970 on ½ inch data tape is the oldest digital carrier in our collection. It is likely that this record contains important family, language and country information about Aboriginal people living in the Northern Territory at the time. In 1997 this important record was copied to magnetic tape, because the original 1970 data tape was at risk. Then, in 2003, it was migrated again as part of a National Archives project to identify and preserve records on legacy media aka physical carriers. An external company was used to extract the data from a range of at-risk physical carriers. While the data from this and other records was recovered and preserved, at the time it was not possible to view the records.

Recently, National Archives partnered with Swinburne University and the Australian Emulation as a Service Infrastructure chapter (AusEaaSI) as part of The Australian Emulation Network: Born Digital Cultural Collections Access project.

The goal of this pilot project was to recover the data, and also view the contents of records on 3.5" Apple floppy disks created in the 90s. This uses a technique called emulation.

Emulation recreates the operating environment that a physical carrier and a file was created in. To create an exact copy of the disk's data, called a disk image, the team used a specialised hardware unit, an Applesauce floppy disk controller, available in the Swinburne Digital Heritage Lab. Applesauce can read and capture disk images of a wide range of obsolete disks.

Disk imaging is a useful way to capture all the information contained on a disk, including hidden files.  

The disk images from the floppy disks were then uploaded into the AusEaaSI emulation environment for viewing. Creating the right environment required careful checking of technical metadata and logs, as many individual files were created using software that is no longer available.

Work to preserve and access digital records can be time-consuming and complex. While this project will allow National Archives to preserve a small collection of digital carriers, it is important to continue to improve how we access and preserve all born digital records, especially at scale. Nearly all government records currently being created are born digital. Today's most common file formats will be replaced by different technologies. As an archive, we need to prepare for that future, while preserving our past.

Read more about our past work recovering and preserving records from obsolete carriers.

This light-hearted clip from a 1981 Australia Post training video shows how much attitudes towards digital technology has changed over the years.