4 ms·

My experience with floppy disks is that they don’t last very long.

• leptons 2y ago
  Is 35 years "very long"? Because we just retrieved data from about 50 old Commodore 64 5 1/4" floppy disks after 35 years. They all read perfectly on an old Commodore 1541 floppy drive.
  • lallysingh 2y ago
    It depends a lot on situations. I've heard that there's a fungus in the Southern US that slowly eats some floppy disks (or grows on them, I donno). Also there's a luck component with nearby magnetic sources.
  • TacticalCoder 2y ago
    Lucky you: as I posted a few hours ago... Only about 2/3rd of mine still worked but then they've been stored, for some, in bad conditions. For example some were in an underground garage with lots of cars passage and, after decades, gunk builds up everywhere in the garage.
  • JoBrad 2y ago
    From what I can tell, the upper time limit for magnetic media is generally expected to be 30 years[1]. My money is on survivorship bias for longer time frames. I've had 5 1/4" and 3 1/2" floppies die on me within months of purchase - I don't recall that ever happening for a CD/DVD, but I'm sure someone has had that experience. Anecdotes aren't hard data, but I have 2 CD binders full of CDs and DVDs that have outlasted 3 hard drives that I didn't keep backed up as a young adult, and as long as they were kept away from scratches and heat, all of them were easily read and playable. [1] https://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub54/4life_expectancy https://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub54/4life_expectancy