Is it true that floppy disks die over time?

Question

Iron

Here is such a stupid question: is it true that floppy disks not only lose information over time, but also demagnetize so that it is no longer possible to write to them?
Due to ignorance of the principle of recording and storing information, I thought that the disk itself is, as it were, just a material that is magnetized by the drive, but then there was an opportunity to check tons of floppy disks left from dad, and none of them work: I insert it into the computer, open it: , I get "Insert disc into drive". Although the floppy seems to be working. On this occasion, the thought came to mind that maybe they really are demagnetized and it’s no longer possible to record on them later?
So, should I throw out all this heap of floppy disks or buy a USB floppy?)

Answer 1

All magnetic media demagnetizes over time.
For audio cassettes, after 10 years of lying in a closed, dry, cool room, it means that you can hear indistinct muttering, the bass will most likely disappear altogether.
For digital media, especially the first ones (5.25 "floppies), the period is even shorter, and specifically files can hardly be restored, especially at home. If information on 5" 25 was read in a year, this was considered good luck. 3-4 years - some unique and unlikely case.
For 3.5" floppy disks, in principle, the difference was small, especially considering that the technology had not yet improved much, and the recording density was achieved more purely from a purely mechanical point of view (head positioning).
For hard drives, the period may be longer due to more accurate technologies. But I think that a hard drive lying on a shelf in 15-20 years may not be read. On the other hand, if you periodically turn it on and overwrite the information, the duration can increase significantly. 5-10 years for a hard drive, in principle, should not be a problem.
It is traditionally believed that in the enterarize segment, the most durable are modern tape drives, which have the lowest cost per gigabyte in dollars. In cases where you need to store terabytes, it makes sense to pay attention to streamers. But they say that this is a tribute to tradition, and that durability is no longer so different from hard drives, but the convenience of work is lower.
CD-DVD was considered to have a shelf life of 30-70 years, provided the correct storage location (no sun, cool and dry), but depends on the manufacturer, on the quality of burning. It happened that the CD could not be read after a year due to oxidation.
In general, for the current day, it is best to store in such a way that you regularly move to new information custodians from intervals of a couple of years.

Answer 2

Demagnetized. Moreover, the higher the recording density, the faster the demagnetization. 3" 1.44 Mb floppy disks are often not kept for a couple of years, but the old 5" 360 Kb ones were kept for ten years.

Answer 3

You can (try to) save at least something from any dead device (be it HDD, FDD or CD / DVD), for this:

1. Remove the image from the media in such a way as to try to "pull" as many live sectors out of it as possible. For this, ddrescue is used , for example.
   
2. The captured image is mounted (under windows this is often referred to as a "virtual disk").
   
3. If the file system is not badly damaged, then sometimes it turns out to merge everything from it by regular copying.
   
4. If the file system is badly damaged, then do fsck .
   
5. If fsck did not help, then we buy professional software that is used in laboratories involved in commercial data recovery. Since the whole zoo of freeware/shareware "magic restorers" does not provide significant advantages over fsck.
   

Answer 4

Have you tried a new floppy from the side to check the drive?

Answer 5

floppy disks die mainly from mechanical damage, and not from demagnetization (well, I don’t worry about the moments when they are placed next to magnets or devices with powerful electromagnets). so dust and the subsequent abrasive erasure and scratching is a much more real threat for diskettes.

Answer 6

rawwritewin.exe to help you, creates full floppy disk images. Take an image, then write it to a floppy disk without any problems, you can even mount images!