Good Service To Transfer ZIP discs

ZLoth

ZLoth

Gawd
Joined
Apr 13, 2010
Messages
854
While cleaning out in preparation for a move, I found a box of five old ZIP discs.

Yes, ZIP discs. Yes, I know that brings back either memories or (more likely) a click nightmare.

Any recommendations for a United States-based transfer service to transfer the files to a modern storage format?
 
Or several Zip drives if that's what it takes - the Click-of-Death thing was a drive defect, not a disc defect so you might have to actually use more than one drive to get the discs (or some of them) to be readable depending. Even if you buy 2-3 or more drives it'll still be cheaper than any transfer service would more than likely charge for the procedure.
 
It's funny that you posted this. A month or so ago when I was cleaning out my place, I found a USB zip drive and a bunch of my old original zip disks. 100MB! I thought about keeping it but then looked at my thumb drives where even the smallest one was 8gb and just threw it all in the garbage.
 
Tiberian said:
Or several Zip drives if that's what it takes - the Click-of-Death thing was a drive defect, not a disc defect so you might have to actually use more than one drive to get the discs (or some of them) to be readable depending. Even if you buy 2-3 or more drives it'll still be cheaper than any transfer service would more than likely charge for the procedure.
Click to expand...
CoD is mainly a drive defect, but it can damage good discs depending on how bad the drive has failed. So I'd recommend testing a drive with a blank disk first to make sure it can read/write fine, before trying to read important disks.

Luckily I didn't have to deal too much with Zip drives back in the day, but I used Jaz drives extensively back in the late 90s, and the amount of data I lost to those pieces of garbage was ridiculous.
 
ZLoth said:
"While cleaning out in preparation for a move".....
Click to expand...

I caught that myself when I read the OP but I figured that if there was time to ship the disks out to some data recovery or data transfer service and wait for them to be returned (or the information can simply be dumped on Google Drive or Dropbox or something like that from the recovery service) then they might have enough time to order a couple of drives.

Either way I think we've covered a solution or two that could prove useful. As for an actual recovery or data transfer service to shift the contents from the Zip disks to some other media the first one that came up with a search was this one:

https://www.floppydisk.com/transfer-zip-disk
 
Used FloppyDisk.com, sent off the disks prior to Christmas, got them back last weekend, transferred the files to my NAS storage for later review.
 
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