If you have, or expect to have, 8-inch floppies in your collections, you may be interested in a paper I have put together with Abby Adams at the Harry Ransom Center and Austin Roche, an independent collector of Datapoint hardware and media, also in Austin, Texas. This paper was presented at iPRES 2018.
Data Recovery and Investigation from 8-inch Floppy Disk Media: Three Use Cases (osf.io) (CU Scholar)
As the above diagram suggests, working with 8-inch disks requires a few more pieces than 3.5″ and 5.25″ disks – though KryoFlux is no less critical here. Namely, adapters need to be acquired to both power and connect an 8-inch drive (D Bit is a great resource here). Even then, translating a sector-level disk image into workable files for a researcher can be very tricky.
We go into more detail in the paper, and I hope this can be useful for any practitioners who have this media in their stacks. Though 8-inch floppies come from some of the earliest days of personal computing, there is extremely valuable content on them. As we show in the paper, major creative works are stored on those platters, from script drafts for blockbuster films to early experimental computer graphics work.
Walker Sampson 