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

[Harrison]

Some people in the industry state 10-20 years for floppy disks, but I've got some disks older than that now and they still work perfectly. I think those time scales were more for disks that were regularly used, compared to disks that are stored away. In truth no one really knows how long they will last. It depends on their manufacturer, quality of the disks used, and how they have been used and stored. I expect many will start to fail over 30 years old though.

[Phantom]

Disks are like machines.

You have to protect them inside a floppy drawer box, away from dust, humidity and higher temperature.

Also is good to insert them into your disk drive for a minute, just to work a little (sounds crazy)...

But, everybody now pays the price of the cheap chinese disks they bought in the early 90s, while brands floppies are working 100% even nowadays.

Well, I think that if you carefully protect your floppies they will last for a long time (well, not forever), but as Dave said, I don't believe 10-20 years, but around 30 years (I believe enough time).

Start selling your original Amiga games then.... lol.....

[Spirantho]

No physical media is a good backup. There's only one safe way to backup your stuff, and that's redundancy. In other words, make several copies and distribute them to as many places as you can.
DVD-Rs won't last very long (10 years isn't very long and I wouldn't trust one past that at all). Hard disks (especially modern cheap IDE ones) crash all the time. However, if you keep it on as many servers as you can you should be safe... but there's no single media with which you can store your stuff.

[Harrison]

That is very true, and it is hard to believe that even after all these years no one has yet to invent a real storage media that is 100% reliable for archival of data.

If you think about it, glass pressed media is really the only safe archival method. They contain real pressed data tracks that cannot degrade over time. The only possible way to damage them is scratching the disks. So the logical solution would therefore be pressed DVD-Ram disks in the cartridge format, as that would protect the disk against damage. Sadly I don't think cartridge DVD-ram is really used much these days.

[Spirantho]

That is very true, and it is hard to believe that even after all these years no one has yet to invent a real storage media that is 100% reliable for archival of data.

Yes, they have. It's called a printer with an indelible ink cartridge.

[Harrison]

I've not heard the term "indelible ink" since dot matrix ink ribbon days.

Not so good for digital data archival though.

For printed media, things definitely have come a long way in recent years. HPs professional inks for example are guaranteed to last 200 years, so good for archival. I've got a B9180 that uses these inks and it does produce amazing results, if expensive to run.

[Spirantho]

It's fine for digital data storage.

Got a bad block on your floppy? Fire up the track editor and get typing...

21 00 80 c9 .. .. .. .....

[morcar]

Do what i did a few years ago and buy a disk box and if the top is clear get something to cover it over to make it nice and dark inside. I sprayed mine all black.