The people rescuing forgotten knowledge trapped on old floppy disks

Summary

Knowles notes that for archivists working with archaic software, the process of using modern tools can change the look or feel of the original material slightly. "We try to minimise how much we change things," he says.For now, Talboom believes the most critical work is simply extracting and saving the data from floppy disks – before it's too late. "Many floppy disks are 40 or 50 years old," she says. "The magnetic material they’re written on is starting to degrade. So we have to save them as quickly as possible."As well as this technical work for the archivist community, Talboom is also involving the public in her quest to save the forgotten information trapped on floppy disks. On 9 October 2025, she hosted a floppy disk workshop at Cambridge University Library where members of the public could bring old disks they had at home to see what contents are locked inside.For Knowles, it makes perfect sense for the public to get involved in preserving floppy disks. "There’s clearly a very large interest in family history," he says. "So this is a way for people to recover things that they thought were lost – to learn from what members of their family stored away."Rees hopes it might also be possible to unearth some more work by scientists from Cambridge and beyond. "Old emails and work calendars might not seem like historical documents," he says. "They may even seem banal. But that's how Newton or Darwin's letters would have seemed 200 years ago. Now they're fascinating resources that give us a window into the past."