On Sat, 24 Sep 2011 08:38:45 -0700, Bill
wrote:

On 9/24/2011 1:43 AM, 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've had no problem reading 5.25 disks written in the early 80s, but I
have had problems with the disk drive being inop - I think their
longevity is much longer than you suggest - maybe that's a worst case.
Just as CDs were to have a 10 year max shelf life and the printed ones
(aluminized) seem to (so far) be fine at over 25 years

Ive got a box of at least 1000 3.5" and about that same number of 5.25
disks in a corner, going to the dumpster. The disks are filled with
commercial software such as Novell; games and whatnot. Virtually every
one of them was readable/usable. Ive put some software on DVDs..but all
they really are good for is blanks after wiping. I did save the Windows
3.0-3.65 disks

Many of them came with Xts probably 20 yrs ago.

Gunner

"In the history of mankind, there have always been men and women who's goal
in life is to take down nations. We have just elected such a man to run our
country." - David Lloyyd (2008)