“There wasn’t one system that dominated the market. It was a bit of a wild west,” says Cambridge University Library’s Leontien Talboom, describing the floppy disk era chaos now complicating digital preservation. Profiling the “Future Nostalgia” project, BBC Future details how Talboom sources obsolete drives from eBay to rescue deteriorating magnetic media—preserving the files of Stephen Hawking and others. As iron oxide degrades, she’s racing to prevent the 1970s-90s from becoming a “digital dark age.”