We've mentioned before the work of the Acorn Preservation Team to archive and preserve BBC Micro and Acorn software before it's lost to time and bit rot. As part of this effort, there will be a Software Preservation stand at this weekend's ROUGOL show which will offer a software preservation service. This is possible thanks to a generous offer of time and expertise from Paul Emerton (who you may remember from his excellent demonstration on BBC TV graphics and Acorn machines at the Centre for Computing History).
 
The idea is that you can bring along your BBC Micro or Archimedes floppy discs and if it's not already in the Acorn Preservation Team's archive, Paul will take an image of the disc while you wait and give the original back to you. If you take along a USB stick or SD card, a copy of the resulting disc image will be provided back to you (although be aware that the images of a single floppy disc can be up to around 85MB).
 
Imaging the discs will be made possible thanks to Paul bringing along his Greaseweazle - a small device that reads and stores the raw magnetic flux readings from the floppy disc (hence the large size of the resulting images). The advantage of imaging the discs this way is that it preserves the content exactly, including any special copy protection tracks from the original disc.
 
Even if you can't bring your own discs along, Paul will be available at the stand to chat and give advice on how best to store and avoid damage to both discs and drives to help preserve the life of both.