All Together Now: Introducing the KryoFlux User Guide

Dorothy Waugh, Shira Peltzman, Jennifer Allen | BitCurator Consortium

The KryoFlux, a floppy disk controller card developed by the Software Preservation Society, has become the de facto standard for many digital archives for its ability to safely and effectively capture data from aging floppy disks. Although the KryoFlux is an extremely powerful tool for digital archivists, scant documentation and an unapproachable user forum have hampered wider adoption amongst archives. To address this gap and to encourage more robust use of this hardware, archivists using the KryoFlux at Duke, Emory, UCLA, the University of Texas, and Yale have developed a comprehensive KryoFlux user guide designed specifically for archival contexts and which we hope to make freely available in the coming months.

The guide includes:

  • An explanation as to why an archives might choose to use the Kryoflux;
  • An explanation of floppy disk formatting;
  • Step-by-step instructions on installation and use (both CLI and GUI);
  • Troubleshooting tips and tricks;
  • A list of additional resources.

We have now completed a first draft of our user guide and believe the BitCurator Users Forum offers an excellent opportunity to share our work with active practitioners working regularly with born-digital materials. Our session would explain the impetus behind this project, give an overview of the guide and its content, and aim to solicit feedback and questions from the audience. From our perspective, this opportunity to hear from digital forensic practitioners and potential users of the guide would be incredibly valuable as we prepare it for broad circulation.

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Cite this resource:
Dorothy Waugh, Shira Peltzman, Jennifer Allen. (April 28, 2017). All Together Now: Introducing the KryoFlux User Guide. BitCurator Consortium.