I want you to forget everything you know about about how floppy disks hold data. That’s what I’ve had to do over the last few months as various projects I’ve been working on have challenged my understanding of them. I’ve completely changed my own workflows for working with floppy disk images as a result. This change in perspective has also made it much easier to adapt to new and completely unknown systems. Today I want to talk about how floppy disks store data at a lower level, how you can make more robust disk images, and how doing all that can give you some powerful abilities that can make things much easier and some wild things possible. You can use this knowledge for creating better copies of disks for preservation or for using disk images made by others with your own machines. So no matter what you are doing with them, this should help you better understand floppies.