🚀 go-pugleaf

chuq@Apple.COM (Chuq Von Rospach) writes:

>This may seem like a strange comment, but have you checked your floppies
>lately?...

I've worked in this industry for nigh on 10 years and in my experience
roughly 1 out of 5 floppies will fail after 6 months. The reason for the
failure seems to be partial faults in the media that cause the magnetic
domains to 'float' after a certain length of time. If you repeatedly
write to the floppy, it will probably be OK. But if you put data on and
expect to be able to read it 6 months later, beware the 1 in 5 rule.
An analogy would be having to continually refresh dynamic RAM's, only there
the latency period is somewhat shorter.

The moral of this story is: make more than one backup of the same data
if it is REALLY critical.

As chuq writes. If you EVER discover a floppy with a media error, throw
it away. Re-initialising it will usually fix any existing faults, but they'll
be back in a few months time.

- Paul.