I used to do floppy disk data recovery as a service for students at college. Roughly speaking, we helped one student out every three hours, out of 2,500 students, during busy hours. Based on the rates and hours, I think it would come out to something like 25% of the student body, each year, coming to us with a data loss incident involving floppy disks.
YMMV. I’m sure a lot of people were shoving these things into backpacks, and this was post-2000, so the quality of disks for sale was poorer than it was in the 90s and 80s.
I’ve also (since then, for myself) repaired drives. The drives fail because they’re mechanical and have motors, and anything that moves or has a motor in it will need some kind of service. Servicing a floppy drive requires specialized equipment which is hard to find (or requires a lot of patience—it’s possible to repair a floppy drive with just a screwdriver, but it’s not fun; guess how I know?)
HD floppies were much worse, both 1.44MB and 1.2MB. They are just much more susceptible to defects from wear and tear because of the shrunken sector size. DD 3.5" wasn't as bad.
3.5" floppies were still common while I was in college. I have distinct memories of copying a project to a floppy in my dorm room, popping the disk out, walking next door (literally next door in the dorms, not even going outside up or down stairs or anything), popping the disk into a team member's PC and the project being gone. We laughed it off and chucked the disk in the trash and got another. Project wasn't lost-lost since I had a copy on my hard disk. This was also the era of the 100MB Zip Drives, which I also had in my PC and thankfully all of our lab PCs had, too. That's what I normally used for all of my day-to-day file transfers of any real import. I still have my zip disks, but I seem to have lost my zip drive, so no idea if the disks still have any data on them.
I was on a school paper in high school and was taking photos on a "digital" camera that wrote to 3.5" floppies. Some of them are still with the (printed) copies of my articles I kept. I'll have to see if they survived.
This is probably my "I'm getting old" moment. Good lord.
Yeah at the time. You would get the whole range of good/bad disks. Sometimes even between computers. May work just fine on one computer and not the next. It was not common but it wasnt totally rare either. Just sometimes would catch out out at silly times.
That they are still used in a critical infra item is a bit surprising. Getting new stock would be a major hassle.
Wow, it's crazy how experiences differ! I've never encountered anything more unreliable than zip disks. Even burned CDs lost to the dreaded buffer couldn't compete with the failure rate of those things. Past me wishes I had your luck with them, they were super cool.
Until quite recently, my Dad had a Zip drive plugged into an ancient Pentium box (back when "Pentium" meant "successor to 486"). I don't know when it was last actually used, but it's LED had been on since the 90s.
Sure, but what are the odds they're using these rather than HD 3.5" disks purchased from whatever new old stock they've been able to source over the past 20-odd years?
I used to do floppy disk data recovery as a service for students at college. Roughly speaking, we helped one student out every three hours, out of 2,500 students, during busy hours. Based on the rates and hours, I think it would come out to something like 25% of the student body, each year, coming to us with a data loss incident involving floppy disks.
YMMV. I’m sure a lot of people were shoving these things into backpacks, and this was post-2000, so the quality of disks for sale was poorer than it was in the 90s and 80s.
I’ve also (since then, for myself) repaired drives. The drives fail because they’re mechanical and have motors, and anything that moves or has a motor in it will need some kind of service. Servicing a floppy drive requires specialized equipment which is hard to find (or requires a lot of patience—it’s possible to repair a floppy drive with just a screwdriver, but it’s not fun; guess how I know?)
3.5" disks were much much worse.
HD floppies were much worse, both 1.44MB and 1.2MB. They are just much more susceptible to defects from wear and tear because of the shrunken sector size. DD 3.5" wasn't as bad.
Do you know the reason why?
3.5" floppies were still common while I was in college. I have distinct memories of copying a project to a floppy in my dorm room, popping the disk out, walking next door (literally next door in the dorms, not even going outside up or down stairs or anything), popping the disk into a team member's PC and the project being gone. We laughed it off and chucked the disk in the trash and got another. Project wasn't lost-lost since I had a copy on my hard disk. This was also the era of the 100MB Zip Drives, which I also had in my PC and thankfully all of our lab PCs had, too. That's what I normally used for all of my day-to-day file transfers of any real import. I still have my zip disks, but I seem to have lost my zip drive, so no idea if the disks still have any data on them.
I was on a school paper in high school and was taking photos on a "digital" camera that wrote to 3.5" floppies. Some of them are still with the (printed) copies of my articles I kept. I'll have to see if they survived.
This is probably my "I'm getting old" moment. Good lord.
Sony Mavica?
Yeah at the time. You would get the whole range of good/bad disks. Sometimes even between computers. May work just fine on one computer and not the next. It was not common but it wasnt totally rare either. Just sometimes would catch out out at silly times.
That they are still used in a critical infra item is a bit surprising. Getting new stock would be a major hassle.
We used to copy files three times, better onto three separate floppies
Wow, it's crazy how experiences differ! I've never encountered anything more unreliable than zip disks. Even burned CDs lost to the dreaded buffer couldn't compete with the failure rate of those things. Past me wishes I had your luck with them, they were super cool.
I said this in a parallel thread but 3.5" disks were much less reliable for me even in the 80s with the Amiga.
You had personal PCs but no network in a dorm?
I'm placing that comment between 1985 and 1993.
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Until quite recently, my Dad had a Zip drive plugged into an ancient Pentium box (back when "Pentium" meant "successor to 486"). I don't know when it was last actually used, but it's LED had been on since the 90s.
Sure, but what are the odds they're using these rather than HD 3.5" disks purchased from whatever new old stock they've been able to source over the past 20-odd years?
and how many bits have rotted on those?
I am still able to play all the games on them and recovered my terminal program I wrote in the 80s as well:
https://github.com/spullara/pcterm128
“Modern” disks were not that good though.