[Coco] Refresh your floppy's

[Donald Person]

I personally think it's just entirely due to how/where/environment the media 
is stored in. Plus the random variables in the actual manufacture of the 
media. Years ago I copied my 5.25" to 3.5", and a few of them had indeed 
succumbed to the ravages of time; fortunately most of my "good stuff" was 
saved. It's amazing what people out there are doing to save our data from 
that era; Have you guys checked out textfiles.com ? Have you seen the BBS 
documentary? It's crazy how many people still have their original disks 
collecting dust in their basements, probably no good anymore.

As another poster stated, I've had some media go bad rather quickly, yet I 
personally still have the first CD I ever burned and it's just as good as 
the day I made it. On the other hand, a disc I burned a few years *after* 
that is showing signs of oxidation from the inside. (This doesn't happen 
very much at all on new media, but back then you could get a batch where the 
protective coating over the reflective layer was thin and would wear away 
fairly easily.)

For my "replaceable" files, I now store them on an external HD; for my 
super-important and non-replaceable files (like pictures), they get backed 
up to optical media; I would like to see a study done on the longevity of, 
say, SD cards because I would love to go buy a bunch of the 16 GB SD cards 
and use those as a permanent backup; a lot more data storage than optical 
media and a lot less space needed to store the cards vs. optical discs.

P.S. - For those of you that care about this sort of thing, I burned my 
first CD in 1995 on the college's burner, and ONE blank cost me $15.. YES, 
15 dollars for ONE blank disk  lol -- The burner itself cost the college 
several thousand dollars... What a change in 15 years, eh?!