On Sun, 27 Jul 2008, Josh Paetzel wrote:

> The chances that the floppies themselves are actually any good are 
> fairly low. Back in the mid 90's in the midst of a move I checked all 
> the 5.25" floppies I had, as at that point it had been years since I 
> used them, and the vast majority of them had errors.  My guess is that 
> unless these were very recently written there's probably no usable data 
> left on them.

I wasn't the original poster on this one, but...

I'm surprised to hear that these disks are expected to fail at this point. 
I guess it has been 20 years since I looked at some of my old disks but I 
was thinking I could copy some of the files off of them, copy them to my 
HDD and toss the disks in the trash.

They really don't last this long if kept in a cool dry place, in their 
sleeve in one of those old disk cases?

I thought they would last longer.  I have watched some VHS tapes made 20 
years ago and they still work fine -- not digital, but they are magnetic 
media.

Mike