Best way to archive vintage Mac floppies & CD's to images

[pcamen]

I've got a large number of floppy disks and CD's that came with the last large haul of stuff I bought off of someone last year.  Seeing as floppies are not really necessary anymore given that Floppy Emu exists, I just want to archive all of these guys to images that will be compatible with Floppy Emu.

I searched around the forums a bit but haven't found a good tutorial for doing this.  The closest I saw was to use the dd command on a modern Mac with a USB floppy drive, but there was some concern about the preservation of the resource fork. 

So here are my questions:

1. What is the best disk image format for floppy disks?

2. What is an efficient, reliable way to make disk images compatible with Floppy Emu (and Basilisk and Mini vMac)?

3. What is the best disk images for CD's? 

4. Is there a good way to use CD disk images with a vintage Mac?

5. What is an efficient, reliable way to make disk images that will work on classic Mac and emulators like Basilisk and Mini vMac?

If there is a tutorial someone already wrote that covers all this, please point me at it.  I'd prefer to do this from a modern day Mac if possible.  Some years back I found some hardware that, combined with an old 5 1/4" drive, allowed me to make disk images of my old Apple II disks from my modern Mac.  I'm about to dig this out and fire it up again for all the Apple II disks that came with that big haul.  I'm hoping for something similar for Mac floppies. 

 

[pcamen]

Hmm.  The Kryoflux seems interesting as a hardware solution for archiving that can be used on  modern Mac or Windows PC.

 

[pcamen]

This is what I used to archive Apple II disks to images, the FC5025:

http://www.deviceside.com/fc5025.html

 

[Cory5412]

Curious about this myself, int erms of what people think is "best" (I certainly ahve my own preferences) because eventually everything on vtools (which includes literallye verything on macgarden, I got the "E" apps folder loaded earlier on the stream) will need to be converted.

For diskettes, I'm told the best format is diskcopy 4.2: DC6 can read it and 1.4M DC42 images should be writeable with PCs and USB floppy drives as well.

For CDs, I'm partial to DC6 images for anything that'll be opened on a vintage Mac, and using a PC with something like infrarecorder or imgburn (I have both) to image the disks into something that'll be burnable with win/mac. It's what I used for what's at http://personal.stenoweb.net/oldmac/ 

All my personal floppies are imaged with dc6, the good news is I'm told dc6 can convert floppy image formats.

 

[Unknown_K]

There is no real cross platform imaging of floppy disks (especially when you get into copy protected games).

Diskcopy for the mac works great, Winimage for the PC works fine. When it comes to CDs anyhing that rips to ISO is great, the only issue would be DATA CDs with audio tracks (discjuggler is what I used for that on the PC) and console game discs.

 

[pcamen]

I am going to order a Kryoflux when they become available in May and see how this works as a way to create disk images from floppies from my modern day Mac.  If nothing else, it is cool as heck as it appears it can even do 400k disks. 

In the meantime, seems like just creating disk images on a vintage Mac with a working floppy with either Diskcopy 4.2 or Shrinkwrap should be a good start.  But I'm still confused about the format.  I get that Diskcopy 4.2 creates DC42 images, that will be named with either .IMG or IMAGE.  But I've also read that you can't take them off a HFS file system to somewhere else because they will lose their resource fork.  Is there a different image format that is portable in this way?  Obviously many of us are dragging floppy images around on our modern day Mac + PCs to use with Floppy Emu and emulators like Basilisk.  The ones I've used recently (and the ones that come with Floppy Emu's seed SD card are .dsk extension.  So what format is this?  When I get info within Basilisk / System 7, it says "Disk Copy document". Within Basilisk I can double click on a .dsk file to open it as a floppy disk that can be read/written to.  Will this also be true for vintage macs?  I'd much prefer a portable image format than on that must be compressed or binhexed to be portable. 

Does anyone have full manuals for Diskcopy 4.2 and / or Shrinkwrap 3.5.1 (or any version)? 

 

[pcamen]

Just for kicks, I figured out the volume of various floppy sizes and how much space a Terabyte of floppies could occupy. 

For 360k Apple II floppies, a TB would fill up a 15x20 room with a 9 foot ceiling height.

For 1.44 MB floppies, a TB would fill up a quarter of the same room. 

 

[LaPorta]

.dsk are DiskDup images, a program

i have only just begun to use. The advantage of these on the FloppyEmu is they are writable and can be used as HD20 images.

As for archiving, it depends on what it is. Something that will be used in System 6 or lower, I make DiskCopy 4.2. If it’s something that can be opened and used on a machine that can run DiskCopy 6, I’ll use that. I have no worry about resource forks since I have an all-Mac operation. If I do need to send something like that across a resource-hostile network, I use BinHex or StuffIt, as the newer expanders can work on almost anything, type and creator codes or not.

If I am archiving folders and files that are not otherwise on disks, I’ll use Stuffit 1.5.1. This allows for unstuffing on pretty much anything from a 512k up.

 

[CC_333]

Just for kicks, I figured out the volume of various floppy sizes and how much space a Terabyte of floppies could occupy. 

For 360k Apple II floppies, a TB would fill up a 15x20 room with a 9 foot ceiling height.

For 1.44 MB floppies, a TB would fill up a quarter of the same room. 

That would be a *lot* of floppies!

c

 

[AlpineRaven]

For me - I've always used DiskCopy 6.3.3 or 6.4/6.5, because I am able to mount images.
Cheers

AP

 

[CC_333]

I've always used DiskCopy 6.3.3 or 6.4/6.5, because I am able to mount images.

DiskCopy 6.4/6.5 is nice, because those versions can mount most uncompressed OS X DMGs.

c

 

[Cory5412]

Part of my work wtih VTools is going to be to convert every piece of classic-compatible CD media that's been imaged to macgarden to dc6 and/or ISO so they can be used without having to hunt down beta versions of discopy. (Which, will also be on vtools, but.)

And, to my knowledge only the more recent 6.5 betas can mount DMGs.

 

[olePigeon]

I use Disk Copy 4.2 for all floppies.  It's widely considered the best version for making floppy disk images.  For floppies with creative Copy Protection schemes (such as custom tables with "bad" blocks), I use DiskDup+ and create a Disk Copy 4.2 compatible image.

For anything not a floppy, I use Disk Copy 6.3.

I've considered Kyroflux off and on for many years, but no one on their forums seems particularly interested in backing up Apple software.  There is no official support for Macintosh formats with Kyroflux.  Best of luck with it.

 

[Paralel]

Using a PC, if you want to image a mac Mixed Mode CD (Data + Red Book Audio), you can use PowerISO, it reproduces them perfectly. PowerISO is also capable of reading "out of spec" CD's, up to 900 MB's of storage, if your drive has the tolerance for it (they are exceedingly rare, but they do exist).

 

[Mk.558]

http://www.applefool.com/se30/moreinfo.html#Working_with_Disk_Images

I prefer DC4.2 images by a long stretch. Only issue is they won't work with Windows tools, at least the ones I found (OmniFlop/Rawwrite).

You could also look at Copy II Mac. If you have an older PC with an internal floppy drive (I'm thinking 386 or 486, not sure on the exact specifics) then the Copy II PC Deluxe Option Board could work. There's a section in the manual about Mac stuff.

 

[Unknown_K]

I have a deluxe option board for the PC and it is pretty good at reading 400K mac floppies from what I read.

 

[pcamen]

Okay, got a IIsi working that I am using to create .image files with Disk Copy 4.2. 

I've seen some conflicting information about resource forks and modern day Macs.  Will a Mac running Mojave properly handle .image files and preserve the resource fork? 

With regard to DiskDup+, I see four versions of DiskDup on Macintosh Garden:

DiskDup+ 2.7

DiskDup+ 2.9.2

DiskDup Pro 1.3.2a

DiskDup Pro 1.2

Can anyone enlighten me to the differences between Pro and +?  Any reason NOT to use the higher numbered versions?

And sadly, the DiskDup+ versions there, seem to have problems. 

DiskDup+ 2.7 - comes in a .sit file which uncompresses to a folder with a single file "DiskDup+ of type "document" which can be opened (can't find the program ...).

DiskDup+ 2.9.2 is a binhexed stuffit compressed file, which spits out a .img file.  I can't get DC 4.2 to read this image and double clicking on it gives the same issue as above (type document).

DiskDup Pro 1.3.2a seems to work.

 

[Dog Cow]

I've seen some conflicting information about resource forks and modern day Macs.  Will a Mac running Mojave properly handle .image files and preserve the resource fork?

That's because people make guesses and assumptions instead of running simple tests to discover the truth of the matter.

Here's a real simple test to resolve the resource fork question:

Unstuff, or decode, or copy or whatever, some classic Mac application that has a BNDL and custom application icon in the OS X Finder. Do you see its application icon? If yes, then your version of Finder and OS X supports resource forks.

 

[Mk.558]

The newer versions of OS X, such as 10.8 and above, can have problems with files with the resource fork structure, or at least I did.

Don't use Disk Dup+. Use DC4.2 or 6.3.3.