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HOARfD

25 August 2025

Pronounced HOARD (The 'F' is silent), Headless On-demand Automatic Raspberry pi (Floppy) Dumper is designed to run unattended on a dedicated headless Raspberry Pi without an internet connection or extra dependencies. Just flash any old Raspberry Pi with any typical Raspberry Pi OS, copy the .py script over, set it to run as a service at startup, and reboot. Now you're ready to copy the contents from any floppy in a USB floppy drive to a USB flash drive.

A USB Floppy drive with a Raspberry Pi Model 1 mounted on top.

About HOARfD

HOARfD was intended for copying floppy disks from Sony Mavica FD cameras rapidly in the field. It has been tested on an original Raspberry Pi 1 running Raspberry Pi OS Lite (32-bit) (Release 2025-05-13).

Stack of floppy disks. Photo taken with a Sony Mavica FD75. Simply run this program as a service as root at startup on a Raspberry Pi. It will locate a USB Floppy Drive and a USB memory stick. Once a disk is inserted into the drive, it will begin copying the contents to the USB stick. The floppy drive access light will blink slowly once complete. Replace the disk with a new one to perform a new copy.

Another example photo from my Sony Mavica FD75.

Features

Automatic Device Detection by detecting the size of USB storage devices as listed in lsblk
Automatic Detection: No need to manually start the copy; it waits for you to insert a disk.
Safe Archiving: Each disk copy is given a unique folder. The disk is never written to or formatted.
Open Source: The full source code is available for you to inspect and modify!

System Requirements

Floppy Copy is a Python program. To run it, you'll need:

A Raspberry Pi with at least two USB ports.
Python 3.x (comes standard with Raspberry Pi OS and Lite versions)
USB Floppy Drive I'm using a generic no-name one
USB Flash Drive or any removable flash media to store your copied/dumped files

Run Automatically on Startup

Flash a vanilla headless Raspberry Pi.
Copy this python script to the home directory (/home/pi/HOARfD.py).
Run sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/HOARfD.service in terminal.

Paste the following into that file:

[Unit]
Description=HOARfD Python Program
After=network.target

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/python /home/pi/HOARfD.py
WorkingDirectory=/home/pi
StandardOutput=inherit
StandardError=inherit
Restart=always
User=root

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Reboot the Pi with a USB floppy drive plugged in.
System is now ready to receive a USB memory stick and a Floppy disk.

Download Now!

You can visit the GitHub page here or click the link below to download the latest version of HOARfD!

Download HOARfD (v4.2)

Source Code

Go on make it yourself.