Also, holy CRAP are Staples-branded floppies awful. The slider doors jam, the slip mats are breaking down, even the plastic itself is getting brittle. Just cheap and nasty. I'm hesitant to put any of these in my LS120 drive for fear of them breaking apart and killing it.

Obscure old games I'd never heard of. And the odd DOS virus.

xjas wrote:

I bought a big stack of 3.5" disks at a thrift shop today (about ~40 disks for $2.) Naturally I had to start going through them to see what was on them. Proprietary data be damned, if someone donated them to a charity shop without wiping them it's fair game.

In some places that can land you in legal trouble (or reveal the previous owner's creepy habits and land them in legal trouble). Personally I'd just wipe them.

Yeah i will go through them for sure. If its something random like the car photo you found i may share. But if its something really out there i would never share just delete it. Though i may take a peek. Its like going through lost treasure.

Yeh gotta check out whats on 2nd hand drives, just out of curiosity!

99.9% of the time its boring and at best gives may find some interesting file in with assignments, work docs or other boring files, but as I have no idea who this person is really its of limited interest anyway.
Think I got a program or 2 off old hard drives many years ago, but its been along time since I've found anything useful.

software keys are always handy to grab as well, just in case

I HATE used home made floppies. You never know if they have mold that will gum up the read head, virus you don't need, or the fun of installing a program just to get to disk 12 of 12 and finding it faulty.

Untouched (as in not over written) original driver disks as cool to find, but I would rather just use new floppies and let the old ones rot.

I do love original boxed software disks.

It's an interesting quesion. Personally I'd never go through any personal files (photos/documents) because 1. I wouldn't want anyone going through my documents and 2. I honestly don't care what's in their files, if it's a modern hard drive I won't even bother checking it just gets wiped straight off. If it's old media (floppy or CD) or an old hard drive and there's the chance of recovering some applications or drivers that didn't make it onto the modern internet then absolutely I'll have a check, before it gets wiped 😀 Doesn't happen very often though.

I guess soon this will be a fairly moot point, my chances of recovering files from floppy and CDs seem to drop every year. Especially old CD-R's

I always check every floppy, HDD, CD etc. that I get from a thrift store or find in the wild. I'd hate to be caught storing child porn or other illegal material if my home gets raided by mistake or by some jealous neighbors call.

I always go through HDDs, CDs, floppies, ZIPs etc., usually because I want to find something lost. One time found lost collection of Miroslav Nemecek's programs like park.com, autopark, safedisk, dosman and tons and tons more useful programs. Also I found Seagate tools and WD tools, very useful software.
And for viruses? I am not scared, I have ton of floppy drives, one test PC which gets reinstalled almost every day. 😁

Sometimes I buy secondhand USB drives that are supposed to have been wiped, and try to recover data from them. I regard it as useful practice.

A couple of times I've offered to return them to their original owners. Occasionally someone replies, but no one's taken me up on the offer yet.

xjas wrote:

Sony Mavica camera

That was actually a very interesting camera to use.

I never knew it was that expensive, but by the time I got to use it (I was not the owner), it was already old.

It's kinda what's already been mentioned here, most of the stuff is very boring and not really interesting. Software keys were handy to have though. I got me a couple of those XP VLK keys that way pretty early and later found an original disk as well (lucky me 😁).
I did find telephone numbers which most would probably not be functional even when I found them, job history stuff, very boring holiday photographs which were limitlessly boring to go through. Virtually all the stuff that was on there got deleted.

Old savegames weren't particularly interesting and at the time I had no idea how to extract driver files, so I didn't bother with those.

And luckily I never found anything awkward, except maybe for some ASCII porn 😵

Tetrium wrote:

And luckily I never found anything awkward, except maybe for some ASCII porn 😵

Hey that's a valuable part of computing history!

Errius wrote:

Tetrium wrote:

And luckily I never found anything awkward, except maybe for some ASCII porn 😵

Hey that's a valuable part of computing history!

Ah noes, and I deleted all of it 😵
🤣

I've found once floppies labeled <insert the name of an early 2000's star> <number> like for example "britney spears 1". Most of them were completely empty, few of them had star's photos, but nothing wrong, but one or two of them had naked pictures 🤣

Unknown_K wrote:

I HATE used home made floppies. You never know if they have mold that will gum up the read head, virus you don't need, or the fun of installing a program just to get to disk 12 of 12 and finding it faulty.

Untouched (as in not over written) original driver disks as cool to find, but I would rather just use new floppies and let the old ones rot.

I do love original boxed software disks.

Heh I literally pull the door back and spin the disks through 360 degrees to look for mold or anything that could damage my beloved LS120 drive before I even putthem in. :p No worries about viruses as Im not reading them on their native OS.

I like the Mavica it works alright a little slow to load but, we have one that we still use at the computer store.

Do you guys bother using floppies with bad sectors? Or do you just throw them out?

Errius wrote:

Do you guys bother using floppies with bad sectors? Or do you just throw them out?

I toss them, they will just get worse.

On local auctions often I find old floppies given away in lots. A few times now I got some of these, completely free.

Mostly the owners don't even remember what's on them. But I always make sure to verify if there's any personal or important info on there before formatting for my use... possibly a relic from my days in computer customer service. If there is valuable data, I make a CD out of the files, and give it to them. Free.

Most common case I've seen is family pictures and letters. I'd hate to see those erased and lost to the actual family in the process.