How should I store my floppy Disks? How long will they last?

[Vangar]

Hi guys,

I looked around the net a bit but couldn't find any solid information - So who better to ask then the Amiga gurus?

I have around 600 backed up floppy disks. What I need to know, is how long will they last before they become demagnetized, if ever? Will keeping them in the dark do more damage after a long time then if i kept them in the shade or sunlight?

Right now, they are stored upright disk-to-disk with wood blocks between each letter (Ablock diskdiskdisk....diskdisk BBlock Etc) In a transparent plastic box upstairs on a carpet floor. Reasonably airtight and dusttight.

Also this is a different topic to this, but I recently opened up all my Amigas to make sure they are still in working order after an expansion card with a battery exploded. Unfortunately the card with the explosion went unchecked as I was away and completely ate though the main motherboard of my A500. Luckily the other two had cards without batteries, but I did remove a battery from another card that had not exploded yet. Food for thought!

Thanks,

-Evan

[Tiago]

Oh boy, there are lots of ideas about that, some say anti-static bags, some say to put them in vacum bags,
I think the most important is avoid all costs, sunlight, humidity and dust, after that, maybe a proper temperature.

[Submeg]

Is it because you want to save the data or the disks? If you want the data, then you should put them on a harddrive to back them up....burn to DVD etc...

[Stephen Coates]

burn to DVD

That's just asking for trouble.

Probably the best way to make sure you have a good copy of all the data is to back them up onto a hard drive as Submeg mentioned.

Floppy disk storage should be quite easy, keep it away from lots of dust, humidity, magnetic fields, excessive temperatures.

[Harrison]

As the others have said. Keep them in dust free, dark location that is dry and free from magnetic fields like speakers and TVs. Also keep them in a location that doesn't have large humidity changes as that is a killer for both electronics and magnetic media.

Regarding backing up data. Convert all the disks to ADF and store them on HDD is the safest method at the moment. Have 2 drives with the data mirrors for the safest setup. Any other storage media is still far from secure in the long term. Many makes and types of disc dye used in DVD-R will degrade in under 10 years. Especially the organic dye types. Metal based DVD dyes will in theory last much longer. The Verbatim AZO+ metal dye is meant to be good for 100 years for example. But you never know. At least with HDDs, when they are failing, if you had 2 mirroring the data you can just swap a bad one and mirror back from the other. Or even better would be to have 3 HDDs setup as RAID5 so even if one disk fails, just swap it over and all the data will be rebuilt from the other 2 disks. That is the most secure method.

[Vangar]

Alrighty. I have them on a middle shelf, in a plastic container in my cupboard. Thanks for all the input, I'll be taking it into account. Does anyone know the expected life on these disks?