I did the same with my Amigas about 5 years ago, which was more complicated than your process (I had to make a cable and buy a USB-to-RS232 adapter since modern PCs don't have serial ports). A few of the floppies were unreadable, particularly the ones where I'd used one of the non-standard formats that packed more data onto the disk and performed faster, but I was mostly able to pull everything off, and the hard disks were fine. I have a directory on my Linux box of the old Amiga stuff, and can play the mods I wrote, and poke around at some of the stuff I wrote, including the first book I ever wrote (which was an interactive Jazz improvisation course in AmigaText), and such.
Honestly, though, other than the music, I didn't find much worth keeping. Pirated games, 8-bit porn, etc. Though, it did remind me of the name of my favorite old synthesis tool (RGS), so I was able to look it up and do some research on modern alternatives...which it turns out there aren't really any, unfortunately. I'd carried on a conversation with the developer when he announced no further development, and wish I still had the notes, as he'd included quite a bit of technical details about the way it works (though it's mostly obvious now that I'm more knowledgeable; FFT over time for the generation of images, adding sine waves for the other direction). But, I've never gotten around to trying to reproduce it.
Interestingly, those ancient machines (a 2000 and 3000, both with hard disk controllers and hard disks; an AD516 sound card; and some other formerly very expensive hardware), and a pile of random Amiga junk and magazines, sold for $300. Given that PC stuff from that era would bring nothing, I'd say the resale value of Amigas has held up shockingly well. Collector value, I suppose. Even weirder, I guess, I bought a Commodore 64 after getting rid of the Amigas.
I have probably hundreds of DeluxePaint animations from the mid-90s distributed across a handful of floppy disks and a couple of A1200 hard drives (from when I wanted to be a video game artist, of course!). I've wondered before how I might ever go about recovering them, if indeed they are recoverable. Any instructions you'd recommend?
I tried several options, and finally settled on the Amiga Forever bundle, which includes software for transferring things which actually worked. It's been years, now, and I don't remember all the details...I just remember hacking together a cable, buying a USB-to-RS232 adapter on ebay, being frustrated for a week or so trying various bits and pieces from source, and then buying Amiga Forever, and things just magically came together and started working.
It wasn't as easy as I'd hoped it would be, and it wasn't as easy as it would have been had I done it when I first moved to PC. Since transfer utilities and hardware were commonplace back then.
Unfortunately a lot of the solutions for Amiga <-> PC conversion no longer work on modern PCs (i.e requiring old versions of windows, isa slots, etc).
The hard drive is easy, you can just plug it into your PC and mount it under linux (using the affs filesystem). If your a windows users I think WinUAE might be able to mount it but I don't know.
Hard drives on the Amiga were usually SCSI. Specifically, the very old SCSI interface, which has never been widely available in PCI cards.
This was my problem with the "just plug it into your PC" process. So, I ended up needing to connect the machines via serial and transferring the the Amiga Forever tool.
But, I guess if you had IDE disks, that'd be easier...though the old IDE standard plugs are also dinosaurs at this point. Not as hard to find as old school SCSI, but still not certain to be available. I happened to have a vast hardware closet from running a hardware business for several years...but even that was insufficient.
A600, A1200 and A4000 all had internal IDE interfaces. The A3000 had a SCSI interface. All other Amiga models had to use add-on HDD interfaces, which started SCSI because that was the dominant platform and shifted more to IDE over time.
So, I'm not sure I'd agree that SCSI was more popular on Amigas over time.
Honestly, though, other than the music, I didn't find much worth keeping. Pirated games, 8-bit porn, etc. Though, it did remind me of the name of my favorite old synthesis tool (RGS), so I was able to look it up and do some research on modern alternatives...which it turns out there aren't really any, unfortunately. I'd carried on a conversation with the developer when he announced no further development, and wish I still had the notes, as he'd included quite a bit of technical details about the way it works (though it's mostly obvious now that I'm more knowledgeable; FFT over time for the generation of images, adding sine waves for the other direction). But, I've never gotten around to trying to reproduce it.
Interestingly, those ancient machines (a 2000 and 3000, both with hard disk controllers and hard disks; an AD516 sound card; and some other formerly very expensive hardware), and a pile of random Amiga junk and magazines, sold for $300. Given that PC stuff from that era would bring nothing, I'd say the resale value of Amigas has held up shockingly well. Collector value, I suppose. Even weirder, I guess, I bought a Commodore 64 after getting rid of the Amigas.