On 2011-09-24, DougC wrote:
On 9/23/2011 11:39 PM, Ignoramus14736 wrote:
I had a 17 year old diskette (1994) with some of my old C code
archives from 1988 or so. I could never get around to reading it,
finally bought a USB diskette reader. To my utter surprise, I could
read it and recovered all archives. Now I have my old MS-DOS library
that I wrote and made money using. Amazing...

You lucked out.
As I recall, 5.25's might hold for ~3 years.
3.5's might go for ~5 years; beyond that was iffy.

The hard drives were total opposites though--they could easily read &
write data 10-15+ years if they were retired before they had
mechanically failed.

I think that I was lucky because the diskette sat unused and was not
subject to mechanical wear.

i