There's been a lot of fussing around with recovering floppy-disk content in recent years amongst people working in digital archives & digital preservation, much of which is "busy work" by people who started their careers well after the end of the floppy-disk era & want to have some fun playing with archaic/"dead" media. Especially for organizational records (personal or family archives are a different matter) I don't think there's much evidence of the value or necessity of this work, primarily because people don't take a bigger-picture view of the recordkeeping practices of the time when the floppies were created.

If the floppies date from the pre-LAN "sneaker-net" era of isolated workstations, perhaps even before the era of workstation hard drives, and you have good reason to believe the  content was created in common office-work using common office applications, you can be sure that the floppy disk content was a backup copy of working files or final versions of records for which the "official record"/copy-of-record was on paper: printed documents or database reports. You can therefore destroy the floppies according to your schedules for backups or transitory records.

If the floppies date from the early days of LANs and shared storage on servers, the floppy disk content is, again, most likely backup copies of files or data for which the organization's electronic record was kept on the shared storage, and where, again, the official record was on paper (for office documents and reports). Even in large organizations with well-established networks, ca.2000 or so, individuals would often keep personal backup copies on floppy disk because they didn't trust network storage. This lack of faith often wasn't so much a problem with the technology as it was a vestigial practice as we transitioned to new computing environments. As well, it wasn't unusual to have quality-of-service problems with IT staff which encouraged these vestigial practices: many lacked client-service skills (they were transitioning, too).

Obviously there will be exceptions, where you know that the only copies of important documents, valuable data sets, program source code, or whatever are on some floppy disks - unfortunate accidents which do happen -- but if you don't know that's the case -- someone's just uncovered a cache of inscrutably-labelled floppies in a closet or desk drawer -- then the odds are they're just backups or working files and it's a waste of your organization's resources to have the content recovered or to even spend much time thinking about it. YMMV, but I know that any floppy disks I encounter in my organization that were created by admin staff fall into the backup/working-file category.

Chris
_____________________________________

Chris Halonen
University Records Manager
Secretariat & Office of General Counsel
University of Waterloo
519-888-4567, ext. 38284
http://uwaterloo.ca/records-management/

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