Backup of diskettes

My father has found several old diskettes which might contain some genealogy information he wanted to salvage And asked if I could help him with that. So I researched a little about dos emulators for Mac and found the dosbox-x project. This seemed promising so I borrowed a USB floppy drive from my son and got cracking. Unfortunatly I could not mount the drive in dosbox-x so I had to find an alternative

Finding a way to backup the diskettes

So mounting the floppy drive directly into the dosbox-x was not an option. Next stop was to try and make a backup of the diskette to an image file. I quickly found that there are many many of such image file types. From the very complicated flux file format up to a simple byte dump. Not having access to special equipment for dumping the magnetic flux I opted for a simple byte dump.

How to create a backup instead of an empty file

Unfortunately most of the online tutorials were about creating an empty image file. But I wanted to backup an existing floppy. So in the end I ended up using the following commands:

umount /dev/disk4

This is done because the floppy is automatically mounted when inserted into the drive and the following command needs it to be not active.

dd if=/dev/disk4 of=image.img bs=512 count=2880

So this used the dd (duplicate disk?) command with an input file of /dev/disk4 (which is where my floppy drive is located) an output file of image.img (you can use whatever you like here) a block size of 512 and a total 2880 of those blocks. This is for a 1.44 MB floppy.

The image file can then be used to be attached tot the dosbox-x instance. It seems to work for what I want to do, but I read online that copy protection of certain programs / games will not be fooled.