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Dusting off some old floppies and trying to get the data off them has been... an experience. I've found that the biggest hurdle isn't always the hardware (though finding a working USB floppy drive can be tricky!), it's often the disk degradation itself. Anyone have go-to methods for dealing with partially unreadable disks? I've tried multiple read attempts, and sometimes that works, but other times it seems to just make things worse.
Also, what software do you reccommend for imaging the disks? I've used WinImage in the past, but I'm curious if there are better options out there now, especially ones that are good at handling errors and creating sector-by-sector copies. I'm mostly concerned with preserving the data, even if it's partially corrupted, so I can at least try to recover what's salvageable later.
a question for those who've successfully recovered data: what's the oldest media you've managed to get data from,and what was your recovery rate? I'm trying to manage my expectations here – some of these disks are literally decades old!