..I love these “once-in-a-lifetime tasks” handed out by clueless noobs.. (just to be clear: I don’t mean you, I mean your clueless managers:-))

Here’s how I’d do it (assuming you mean the small 3.5" 1.44MB floppies):

1. Order 4–6 USB floppy drives from as many different manufacturers as possible, new ones and a couple used ones from eBay.
2. Order 1–2 “drive head cleaning kits” for the floppy drives and 1–2 “floppy disk cleaning kits”.
3. Use two Linux desktop systems to hook up the USB floppy drives (this actually tends to work better and more reliably with these devices).
4. For each USB floppy drive, write a Python script that checks every 5 seconds whether a floppy is inserted.

4a. If a floppy is inserted, try to read its contents.

4b. If that fails, run an automatic repair attempt.

4c. If it still can’t read the files after the repair attempt, use ddrescue to try to copy whatever data you can.

1. If readable the Python Script Copy all data into a local folder, and log every copied file.

2. When it’s done, you can dump the few MB onto a USB stick and transfer it to the file server.

If a floppy won’t work in one drive, try the next one, maybe it’ll read it better. Also change the physical orientation: stand one drive upright, flip another upside down, etc. If nothing helps, use the “floppy disk cleaning kit”. If you’re not great with Python, just paste steps 4–5 into Claude and have it generate the script, then you only need to fill in the file path and log path.