Non-current, Rare Portable Magnetic Media
Materials saved to uncommon storage devices where the media is out of warranty, reader devices may no longer be supported or integrated into hardware infrastructure, and reader devices are extremely hard to acquire due to rarity: typically, more than five years old.
Examples
Bernoulli, Canon Diskfile, Superdisk, Jaz, MiniDisc, and similar
Mitigations
Data can be preserved only with the ability to acquire drives and make them functional; media items must be in good working condition; original documentation can be difficult to locate, and drivers or other dependencies may be impossible to acquire; much specialized work is necessary to make drives work and transfer data; uncertainty over IPR or the presence of orphaned works.
Bit List History
Added to list: 2023Last Review
2023 Review
The 2023 Council added this as a new, split entry related to the ‘Non-current, Portable Magnetic Media’ entry to highlight the increased risk for more unusual and less common formats associated with the media. They also noted that it is likely that more current formats will fall into this category over time, there will remain a need for use and development of forensic tools and techniques. The Council also recommended that an effort to create a comprehensive list of formats that may qualify for this category be undertaken; they suggested an open call and encouragement to the community to contribute examples to add to the entry for the next major review of the Bit List, as by their nature they are harder to identify and, by addressing those not as common, there can be further development and cross-referencing across resources (e.g. registries, technology watch, etc.).
2024 Interim Review
These risks remain on the same basis as before, with no significant trend towards even greater or reduced risk (‘No change’ to trend).
A further rescoping is also recommended for the 2025 review to revisit the current splitting of the non-current portable magnetic media into two (for rare and for common). The reader may not be rare (3.5-inch floppy drive or 5.25-inch floppy drive), and it is possible to get a flux stream from this type of media but there is no way of converting that media to binary files, so essentially no way of accessing the actual content. In this way, it may not be worth splitting out, because by creating a flux stream you are essentially saving the data from further degradation on the portable media format.
Additional Information
Additionally, if we don’t do further research in the special types (Such a WANG disks, Lexitron, ICL computers), that data will also be eventually lost, even if we have a flux stream. This is not really a problem for the more common types, such as IBM, which even tools like FTK Imager can convert and make accessible.
It is important to distinguish these materials from the floppy, hard drive, and other common formats for which there are still a large number of readers available and tools have been developed (FC5025, KryoFlux). These less typical, unusual or ‘weird’ formats were momentary and ephemeral and weren’t very popular, but archival data exist on them and there are very few readers available and very few tools, if any, exist to support them. There is an overall lower impact because there are few collections on these media, relatively.
Case Studies & Examples
- Can anyone help set up a bernoulli drive?, Spiceworks Community (2010), [accessed at 2023-10-24].
- ‘Help needed to run a SCSI Jaz drive., LinuxQuestions.org (2005), [accessed at 2023-10-24].