Digital Forensics Archives - ross spencer :: exponentialdecay.digipres

Image provides a simple illustration that the goal of a flux device and a USB disk drive is to generate a functional disk image

Just one more thing: Myths, Risks and Realities of Floppy Disk Preservation

A few weeks back, along with colleagues, Leontien, Tyler, and Julianna, we presented a paper at iPRES 2026 titled: Myths, Risks and Realities of Floppy Disk Preservation

The abstract read as follows:

Thorsted, Tyler; Talboom, Leontien; Spencer, Ross; Barrera-Gomez, Julianna

Brigham Young University, United States of America; University of Cambridge Libraries & Archives; Independent Researcher; Harvard University Library

Floppy disks remain vital for accessing early digital collections, yet online forums and blogs circulate many untested myths around these carriers. This paper examines common claims about reading disks; handling, cleaning, storage and media fragility; evaluating them in the context of contemporary workflows. Drawing on practical experience, targeted testing, and collaboration with conservation experts, we distinguish between theoretical risks and real-world workflows. By situating online advice within our own preservation practice, we provided a grounded perspective that helps preservation practitioners navigate legacy media.

We were taken aback to learn that the contribution had been shortlisted, and indeed, won the Angela Dappert Memorial Award for Digital Preservation, selected by Angela’s partner, Adam Farquhar of Digital Lifecycle Management,

I am still speechless, as I am sure the rest of the team is as well. It is such a privilege to receive this award, and I am incredibly grateful to Adam for selecting us alongside previous recipients.

2021 – Micky Lindlar, Merle Friedrich, & Miriam Reiche, (TIB (Technische Informationsbibliothek))
2022 – Andrew Jackson (The British Library)
2023 – Meghan Lyon, Grace Bicho (The Library of Congress)
2024 – Klaus Rechert (University of Applied Sciences Kehl); Dragan Espenschied (Rhizome); Rafael Gieschke (University of Freiburg) & Wendy Hagenmaier (Yale University Library)
2025 – Matthew P. Burgess, Peter Brotherton (State Library New South Wales)

In hindsight, having the very last presentation on stage before the final keynote might have been a clue about a potential award? Even if it wasn’t a clue, following in the footsteps of many great presentations at an exceptionally deep, and diverse, conference was quite a bit of pressure.

I suspect we were all a little nervous, I definitely was, and as a result I lost my way in the slides a bit, and there were a few points I really wanted to labor on.

The slides for the presentation are available on Google Drive. The paper itself is now available at the BYU Scholars Archive.

As for those few points I really wanted to emphasize, at least I have a chance to write about them below.

Wassily Kandinsky's Three Sounds (1926) demonstrates Kandinsky's characteristic use of color and geometric shapes to conjure the image of three sounds, although exactly how is up to interpretation. Triangles in the image seem to form trees and upside-down mountains. While one circle appears to be the sun, other shapes seem to be emitting sound or forming some kind of subterranean life. Kandinsky suffered from synesthesia, so the image is likely an interpretation of what he was able to hear at the time of painting.

Why we do this work…

There aren’t many rewards in a discipline that is about taking the long term view but occasionally something comes up that you can take some pride in.

Last month, Ed Summers put out a call on Mastodon: digipres.club where he was wrestling with a CD-R format that was difficult to recognize. The disks likely held precious data belonging to his late brother.

Much of the search area had already been examined and narrowed down by folks in the community, including Misty de Meo, Roxi Ruuska, Ethan Gates, and Johan van der Knijff who all contributed suggestions and analysis..

Ed was able to share a copy of one of his disk images, and I had some time that I could dedicate to taking a look as well.

Long-story short, we were able to identify the disks, and Ed has written up the background here: https://inkdroid.org/2026/06/12/tascam/

The situation might be familiar to others: a digital file that isn’t recognized by the major file format identification tools, and yet, because of its context, you know it is something that might be important.

I have different experiences with these types of files, sometimes they are valuable (and you want to look after them), sometimes they are not (and it can still benefit you to get rid of them). The process of finding this out often follows a similar path.

In this instance the files turned out to be incredibly valuable and I wanted to elaborate on the path of discovery. Even though it really isn’t very sophisticated, I hope it will be helpful to those with unidentified digital records who might find the task of identifying them quite daunting.

Image shows two layered waveforms, one a corrupt waveform and the other a good original. The corrupt form is in red and the uncorrupt one is green.

Revisiting bsdiff as a tool for digital preservation

I introduced bsdiff in a blog in 2014. bsdiff compares the differences between two files, e.g. broken_file_a and corrected_file_b and creates a patch that can be applied to broken_file_a to generate a byte-for-byte match for corrected_file_b.

On the face of it, in an archive, we probably only care about corrected_file_2 and so why would we care about a technology that patches a broken file?

In all of the use-cases we can imagine the primary reasons are cost savings and removing redundancy in file storage or transmission of digital information. In one very special case we can record the difference between broken_file_a and corrected_file_b and give users a totally objective method of recreating corrected_file_b from broken_file_a providing 100% verifiable proof of the migration pathway taken between the two files.

Tag: Digital Forensics

Just one more thing: Myths, Risks and Realities of Floppy Disk Preservation

Why we do this work…

Revisiting bsdiff as a tool for digital preservation

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