Huge local Amiga find, need advice...

[rcade]

OK, hopefully this is not against the rules. I am not price fishing or anything like that, I am just putting out this question to ask for advice on how to handle it since it is a really odd situation.

I recently received over 6,000 (yes, that's correct) disks from an old Amiga guy that passed away some years ago. It's a huge collection stored in 10 or so VHS VCR cabinets with drawers that happen to fit the disks in two rows each. The disks are all in great shape and organized. It looks to me like he either was an extreme collector, or a pirate group librarian, or possibly ran a BBS.

It took quite some doing to transport these to my home, and it takes up a lot of space (about the size of a large bedroom dresser). I did pay something to his survivors for the collection, so it wasn't free to me. I thought I could do something with it (archive it, etc.) but it is just daunting due to the sheer size of it.

I am in Augusta, GA, USA which is in the Southeastern US. I wondered if there is anyone who would like to travel to get them from me, or should I split them up by drawer and sell them off to collectors in bite-sized pieces that can be shipped? They are not originals, so they would be pretty much sold as-is, "blank disks".

 

[RuneRider]

I'm in a similar situation, but with about 2500 disks. I had to take them off the sellers' hands in order to get a good deal on an A3000, A500 and a pile of hardware. I'm curious what the consensus from members will be to your question as I'm thinking of disposing of them due to already having several thousand blanks of various types.

I will now have quite a selection of disk holders in various sizes.

 

[k0x]

You sas they are organized. In what way?

Did you try to read some disks?

If there are really BBS content than its interesting.

 

[rcade]

You sas they are organized. In what way?

Did you try to read some disks?

If there are really BBS content than its interesting.

I did spot check some, they seem to be working bootable games, so not just DMS archive files. "Organized" to me just means they are nice printed labels and groups of disks are together...

 

[tbtorro]

I hope this is not considered price driving (mods are free to come in if so and remove this) as this is not a sales thread, but non-original DD disks, however neatly organized are pretty much worthless as sales items.

There are several threads on forums, and on social media of people picking up a bunch of them and not to know what to do with them. This find is not even that unique even in quantity, there are cases of 10-20000 disks 'found' in warehouses. In Denmark, where I'm member of a data history club they have moving boxes upon moving boxes of disks stacked on PALETS, or even fully boxed originals, and yet not enough human time to do anything useful with the stuff. There was a member who cataloged the boxed originals, and took him like a year, but that's it, they are sitting in boxes.

I myself recently got like 400-500 of them included in a sale (I didn't ask for them), where the seller just used them to fill up the shipping weight. You (or others) can use a few dozen of them for driver disks and for 'everyday' Amiga tasks, but beyond that, more disks have not much practical value. People are using GBs of CF cards these days with million and one games and demos on them anyway.

Of course the content COULD be interesting to check out from "data historian" point of view, but that has also zero commercial value. On the contrary, you will be hard pressed to find someone who will devote considerable amount of time going trough 6000 disks to see find something useful even just VISUALLY, let alone reading out the actual data.

 

[rcade]

I agree with you, and all opinions are welcome! That is why I posted this way...

There is some value as "blank disks" but then they are used, and untested, and stored for 20 years. So, it's a risk for someone unless very cheap.

 

[Harrison]

If they possibly contain something rare or unique like bbs, pd library releases or demo scene productions it would be worth preserving them. I have thousands myself from various sources, often in similar ways to you, being given them as part of a larger bundle. But I've also been sent large collections of disks from people rather than people just throwing them away.

I even have a Kryoflux to image them and have been working on that for some time now.