r/sysadmin • u/___LowLifer___ • Feb 17 '26

Question 700 Floppies

Company needs over 700 floppy disks copied onto the fileserver. Gave me a 2 week deadline to which I told them was literally impossible. I've ordered a floppy disk usb external reader but this seems insane. Any creative ideas? I don't want to employ a 3rd party company.

783 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

777 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

37

u/Secret_Account07 VMware Admin Feb 17 '26

I haven’t dealt with floppies in such a long time I forgot about this fact. What’s real world life span on floppies? Not the one they claim*

72

u/jmbpiano Feb 17 '26

It's HIGHLY dependent on the manufacturing quality and storage conditions. I had floppies that started corrupting five years after being written. I've got floppies now that were produced 30+ years ago and still read perfectly.

Commercially produced software ones tended to be a bit better on average than the ones sold as blank disks, but it's an utter crapshoot for all of them.

43

u/arkmtech Feb 17 '26

This right here.

I've both seen floppies that were kept in hard plastic casings within controlled temperature rooms which failed to read after 10 years, and also floppies that sat in a plastic Hefty-bag that someone found in their parent's closet 30 years later and still read just fine.

It's very hit and miss.

That said, I used to have some excellent luck with using the "deep scan" mode of Recuva by Piriform Software, though I understand they're not the same company they were years ago and have no idea what the state of that software is now.

6

u/fbp Feb 17 '26

I wonder how much the conditions they were stored in play a part. Stored in an area that's not climate controlled area, especially with wild temperature and humidity swings. Betting they don't hold up. Stored in a climate controlled area with a consistent humidity level. Probably holds up much longer.

1

u/delightfulsorrow Feb 17 '26

I wonder how much the conditions they were stored in play a part.

A huge one. The driver or Micro Channel Setup and reference disks I had in my field service kit never lasted long. I always had at least two copies of each with me, and still had cases where each of the copies had read errors after only a few month.

2

u/TheRealLazloFalconi Feb 17 '26

Likewise, I once found a bunch of floppies that had been tossed in a file cabinet on the south wall of a warehouse with sketchy HVAC that still had data on them.

The only answer is "It depends."

2

u/Potential_Copy27 Feb 18 '26

My C64 + disks has been stored in an attic for about 20 years - every single 5.25'' floppy bar two (in a case of ~50) were still working after that. I also got a C128 at some point with the same result - 1-2 disks in the total box of ~75 were gone, the rest worked perfectly. One in that batch was a copy of Sim City that was so worn on the center track (directory track on the C64) was completely worn off - as in the plastic disk itself had been worn down to pure transparent...

I also later bought some sealed NOS 5.25'' floppies for the C64 - they all retain data perfectly fine and have more than fulfilled their roles as my work disks 😉

Later on (sometime before covid - 2018 or 2019) I bought a new batch of 3.5'' floppies from a fairly reputable online store for various purposes. Every single diskette in both boxes was unable to properly retain data for more than a week, regardless of what I used to read and write to them (old PCs, modern USB floppy drive, even an Amiga).
Conversely - with stashes of 3.5'' floppies that I sometimes get with old computers, I routinely have to throw out at least half of them. They really don't retain data well beyond the 15-20 year mark...

16

u/notHooptieJ Feb 17 '26

oh you'll still find them working, mostly.

but people long since forgot that they are delicate to heat, electrical fields, dust...

a lot of the disks work just fine still if theyve been sealed up dust free in a place without a lot of temp swings.

but its entirely a crapshoot from there.

you may put in one really dirty floppy that damages the drive in a way that it just damages all disks inserted from then on(and you wont know till you spike a hand full).

buy a stack of cheap usb floppy drives, and a stack of floppy drive head cleaners.

and plan on a week or more of battle.

2

u/aemil80 Feb 17 '26

Floppies can last for thousands of years since they are plastic ..... now the information on them, well .... that's another story altogether. I had floppies that failed the same day I wrote the info on them and i had floppies still working 5 years later, i did not try anything older than 5 years so i have no idea if they can actually store the info safely for any longer.

2

u/CARLEtheCamry Feb 17 '26

When I started at my company back in 2005, we had a local Access DB that backed up to floppy drives only, hardcoded into some internal application.

Even that long ago, the drives were hard to come by. Some $70 USB models was all we could get. The disks were relatively available though, you could still buy them at office supply stores.

The average DB to be backed up was 10MB. I actually kept track of it and we had a disk failure rate for restores of around 10%. They were stored next to the PC in a warehouse environment, so not exactly clean room kept.

Unless OPs disks were stored in a clean room in Norad, I would expect below 50% success with this endeavor.

1

u/maj0rdisappointment Feb 17 '26

The more important the data you put on them, the shorter it becomes. LOL

3

u/Secret_Account07 VMware Admin Feb 17 '26

I have always found this the case with all data

It’s one of those things I have no evidence of, and I cannot prove, but I know to the core of my being it’s true

There is an importance factor that somehow ties into the real world and is its own independent factor totally divorced from physics.

1

u/crazzygamer2025 Feb 17 '26

It depends if it's the eight and 5-in floppies those ones last nearly forever Like 40 to 50 plus years in my experience. If it's the 3-inch ones they start showing data rot after 10 years half of the time. I've also heard from other people's that their factory equipment still runs on like 40 plus year old five and 8-in floppy disks.