@tagomago That was with the real thing. I kept a 486 as my home server until about 2006 or so, but then I lost a disk and learned a lesson from that.
Before retiring it, I booted into DOS, and used VGACopy/386 to create images of all remaining floppies, most of which were just RAR archives full of stuff.
I took me a bit to understand that it was just creating literal copies of the disk, so mounting the images worked really easily.
Nowadays, those images are sitting on the newer home server.