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My wife unearthed a box full of photos on floppies (taken on an old Sony camera that had a built-in floppy drive) dating back to 1999.

I am amazed that nearly all the photo files were still readable and when I copied them to my server. I've got CD's kept in ideal conditions that aren't readable after 3 years.

I've never had a non-readable CD to date and some audio CDs date back before '97. I think I've tossed all my old floppies.

I have had both bad floppies and cd - even had cd's were the foil has pealed off the disk.

When recordable CD's came out, it was luck of the draw on how long they will last. I have some that still read and play fine after 10 years and others that die after three. Magnetic storage is reliable so long as the media is stored properly and it doesn't become oxidized.

my floppies have all lost the data, i can reformat them and they work but i dunt trust them anymore. i do have a few zip100 disks that seem reliable though. never had a cd die without some help.

I found that floppies just aren't made of very good quality anymore. For like the last 10 - 15 years they're just crappy. They don't have the same kind of shelf life like they used to have. When it comes the CD's and DVD's Sony and TDk seems to be the most reliable when it comes shelf life from my experience.

I've had mostly good luck with the CDs I've recorded. However, in my early recording days, I was very selective of my brands to avoid coasters. As for floppies, it seems to be luck of the draw for me. I will say that I've had more than 50% failure rate though.

Coasters. Shit....will anyone beyond our generation even realize that you can burn a bad CD? Funny thing is, when I built my "new" PC ( a shuttle box for college back in maybe...'05) I included a floppy for the "you never know" scenarios. I also still have a bootable floppy for those "you never know" scenarios.

It's funny, because...you never do know. Guess I'm lucky cause it never was known. Bootable USB has officially taken over. Sad part is, I'm sure it "officially" took over long before I ever even adopted it. I feel I'm always the one with the legacy shit "just in case."

LOL, I just removed my floppy drive from my personal PC this year. I finally came to the point where I just never use it. What usually gets me is when there's a driver that needs to extract to a floppy & a floppy only.

normalicy wrote:LOL, I just removed my floppy drive from my personal PC this year. I finally came to the point where I just never use it. What usually gets me is when there's a driver that needs to extract to a floppy & a floppy only.

Yeah, when I built my last desktop about four years ago I didn't even include one. I still have an external one that works just as well anyways if needed.