🚀 go-pugleaf

On Thu, 11 Jun 1998 22:20:13, ratranch@svpal.svpal.org (Charles 
Mosher) wrote:

> With all you folks having trouble with floppies and tapes being corrupted,
> _where_ are you storing them?  I initially format all floppies to make
> sure they have _no_ bad sectors, since diskcopy just writes over bad
> sectors anyway, and destroy all floppies with bad sectors, and rarely have
> any data loss thereafter.  I hesitate to say never, but I can not recall
> _any_ instance of lost data due to anything other than cockpit error on my
> part. 

You are very fortunate.  I store mine on a shelf right above my 
computers.  My house temperature varies a bunch from summer to 
winter.  However I have a more controlled environment at work.  
The problems are the same.  A floppy is good for about six 
months, tops.  I know thy *can* last longer because I have PCDOS 
disks that are several years old that are fine in both 
environments.  The floppys today just don't last longer.  They're
junk.

> We're probably talking about perhaps half a thousand floppies here. 

You are indeed blessed, my son.

> Are you perchance storing them near your monitor, where the degausing on
> power up can also degauss your floppies and tapes?

Three feet above here.  In a drawer or in another room at work.  
I had one fail between writing it in one room and reading it 100 
feet away.  Yep, it was bad on both machines.  It was fine after 
I wrote it.  Nope, I cannot trust floppies anymore.  I just got 
my CD-RW and the first order of business it to copy the floppies 
that I can salvage to CR-R.      

----
  Keith R. Williams
  krw@ibm.net