ScuzzBlog: Diaries January 2019 Entry 11th January 2019: Post 01: Amiga Disks - The Amiga Pensieve Amiga Disks - The Amiga Pensieve I truly love Amiga disks. They are littered all round the place. For the most part they are stored in stacked disk boxes sitting on numerous shelves. At the last count I had 13301 disks in my collection with the last being StereoMaster MicroDeal Amiga 1991. All are catalogued and I use Notepad as a single file and just use the search facility to find a disk. All boxes are numbered so it takes me around two minutes to find any disk here. I do view the disk as a way of trapping fragments of memory. Bit like Dumbledore's Pensieve in Harry Potter. What is even more wonderful is the efficient way sometimes information is stored on a disk. Added to that you often get the artwork, readme files and the joy of holding something in your hand that can be readily and easily understood by the Amiga. It's a little bit of a nonsense what folk say about the life expectancy of a disk. If you have a well maintained floppy drive and store your disks vertical in a dry environment in disk boxes and inside plastic sleeves they will last a lifetime. I have backed up the majority of all 13000 disks with no problem. All my original disks from 1993 work. I can guarantee that. They just never fall over. I don't subscribe to downloading files and storing them like trading cards on a computer. For a game to have meaning it has to be the original disk, original box and original manual. There is just so much satisfaction in actually having the whole package. For me there is no greater joy than opening the game box, looking at the artwork, thumbing the manual and inserting that disk. I speak from a personal point of view. I also have endless HD disks for the PC and similar for the Amstrad and Acorn computers. Give me a floppy disk and I can achieve so much. Even if it did fall over I can rescue some fragments from it. So when I moved half a dozen disk boxes to get at some software stored to the rear of the shelves I found myself as ever sifting through disks and sticking them in the 1200 for a play. Happens. I have been fortunate to have assembled collections of user's disks. Many are numbered and labelled in a specific way. Often little notes are folded into the sleeves of disks. I have whole drawers filled with some users disks. Many copied disks and a lot of original games and software. The demo disks are just wonderful and capture the mood of an era. Cover disks are so colourful and fun to study as you play the content freshly de-crunched onto even more floppy disks. In truth the Amiga does mean floppy disk. Give me a healthy click on an Amiga and I can almost guarantee getting the computer to work. The disk click represents the heart of the computer. For me just having an Amiga clicking in the background is comfort enough. So I took a 100 pictures of a very small selection of the disks I have. They hold fragments of Amiga memory of times long gone now. But opening them reveals more than you will ever glean from an internet download. Deep breath. Amiga Disks - The Amiga Pensieve Fun Fact: It takes 40 seconds for ADFBlitzer to copy a disk. I have 13000 backed up. That's 520000 seconds or 8666 minutes or 144 hours. So do an 8 hour day of nothing else and it will take you 18 days solid. Trust me it took a lot longer than that Surprisingly that is only 13000 MB in truth. Very small. 100 disks per box gives 130 double disk boxes Double disk boxes are the most common. Again all boxes are labelled The 1200s normally are under dust covers Help.. I need more disk boxes !!! And that's just my Amiga disks.. Go figure

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Last updated 11th January 2019

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