Floppies

From personal experience I know that floppies are not the medium to be used in the long run. Over time they do degenerate, especially when they are stored badly, like in a damp and dusty environment. I once lent out my old Amiga500 game computer to my girlfriend's little brother. In their house was a bucket filled with water and some days after he had the computer his mother moved the bucket of water and it dropped empty onto the open box of floppies (over 200). They spend some time they told me cleaning it up with cloths, floppy per floppy per floppy. When I got the computer home again most of the floppies were 'kaput'! The data had been damaged sadly enough. This was due to a mixture of water within the floppies and the method of drying the floppies one at a time. Because they used a cloth and rough method of moving the metal plate protection they must have touched and smeared out the water, rubbing it into the disk within the plastic. And floppies are easily influenced by magnetic forces.

Offered by Michel.

Yes, hard cased floppy disks are liquid repellent, but not resistant. If any liquid would have managed to seep into the casing and dry on the magnetic film held inside, the result may not be noticed right away, but one by one sectors on the disk would go bad and eventually the disk tree (the place on a disk that tells the computer what info is stored where on the disk) would develop a bad sector. Without this info, the disk is useless.

Offered by Thor.