🚀 go-pugleaf

I agree that 5.25" 360k floppys are very reliable.  I have several old
programs from the early 80's still on them.  I also had an old PCTOOLS
backup set (100 360k floppys of an old PC hard disk 40 mb Full backup)
and restored some old files from it a couple of years ago.  The backup
was over 10 years old.  I reinstalled PC TOOLS from the original 360 K
floppys on my older 486 (had a 1.2 mb floppy).  I expected problems
because of age of the disks, I was using a 400K PCTools special format
on the floppy and used a 1.2 mb high density drive to restore.  One of
the rare times in my life that nothing went wrong using my PC!  I
expected hell! Amazing!

Not that I did not have bad 360k floppys in my time with them.  But I
think I had very few. Got rid of all of them except for about 10 blanks
plus original software. I find 1.44 floppys have a much shorter shelf
like.  For example, I have about 300 old 1.44 diskettes after I cleaned
up when I got a Zip drive and moved all my data to them.  I reformatted
the floppys after copying.  About 10-15 would not reformat (but I read
the data off to the ZIP Okay).  I tried other PCs floppys, tapped them
on a desk (sometimes the hub is stuck) but they could not be
reformatted.  I did this about 2 years ago.  Just recently, I needed
about 30 of them.  Many had read/write erros when I used them.  I
thought maybe age, storage, different floppy drive I am using today. 
Tried different PCs, still had a few dead ones.  Reformatted them, still
lost about 5 of them.  Note these were good diskettes from about 5-7
years ago.  Not the 25 diskettes for $10 today stuff.  Must have paid
$20-25 a box of 10.  Strange.  Glad I did not have data on them.  Some I
formatted okay but would not write all data without erros.  I ran
scandisk on them and they had bad sectors.  Note I tried different PCs
so it is not a bad floppy drive.

Just my experience.

And yes, I Know my Iomega Zip drive has the potential of being very a
very bad expierence.  I had read all about the Click of Death and had
one Zip disk (the one they supplied, the Zip Tools disk) start the click
but powered it off immediately and reformatted it.  All okay for the
past 6 months.  Note I have 13 Zip disks, lucky or unlucky!!!  No
important data on them that can't be replaced.  But I got sucked in with
all the hype about the Zip drive and really wanted to get rid of all the
floppy I had.  Now I wonder about it.  But there are not much choices
for reliable backup and archive storage.  Maybe CDs is the way to go,
large capacity, cheap media, everyone has a CD-ROM to read them but
expensive to get set up initially.

Richard wrote:
> 
> Ian Staples wrote:
> 
> > Alecto <alecto@goulburn.net.au> writes:
> >
> > >The trouble is that thay have stoped making quality 3.5" disks nowdays
> > >as the pricepoint of them in the market is too low for quality.
> > >If you want to use floppys for long term storage then 1.2m 5.25" disks
> > >are the best bet.
> >
> > While I don't have a direct comparison of 5.25 versus 3.5, I can
> > confirm that the old 5.25" models were pretty good.  About 6 months
> > ago I copied files from about a dozen Wabash disks (as sold by the
> > then Micro Educational, I think they called themselves) which had
> > been used to transfer the files from the PDP-10 at JCU in Sep 1989.
> > All files copied perfectly, without a single "stutter" from XCOPY. :-)
> 
> my experience is similar - this is a bogus alarm.
> 
> >
> >
> > Cheers,  Ian S.
> >
> > --
> >
> > Ian Staples                        MS-Mail: staplesi@dpi.qld.gov.au
> > c/- P.O. Box 1054 MAREEBA          Phone  : +61 (0)70 928 555 Home 924 847
> > Queensland Australia 4880            Fax  : +61 (0)70 923 593   "   "   "

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