8 Nov
2007
8 Nov
'07
6:55 p.m.
I'm really surprised to hear you say this. Common
consensus, including
your own voice expressed in previous emails here, is that 25 year old 8"
floppies are very reliable, much more so than floppies made in the past
10 years. And that is for floppies that have been used and stored in
sub-optimal conditions, often.
Having NOS 30 year old floppies should be just fine, I'd think.
Now if you wanted to argue that you'd rather trust backups onto virtual
disk images as being more reliable than NOS floppies, then I would agree
with you.
My main concern isn't so much the media (although I wouldn't trust
important data to 25 year old media) - it's the the hardware that
reads it ... 32 hard sector disks are not going to be easily readable
elsewhere, so if the disk system goes "down for the count", you are
faced with a tough job to recover the data - having it arcived with
a few copies of the data (or even disk images) on CD/DVD and you have
a much better chance of being able to access it.
Dave
--
dave06a (at) Dave Dunfield
dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com
com Collector of vintage computing equipment:
http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/index.html