On Sep 24, 3:43*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 regularly read data error free from disks that are over +35 years
old.

Try that with the optical format from the 80's...or the 90's...or from
media from just 10 years ago.

One of the results of changing from magnetic to optical storage media
will be the loss of information during those decades.

TMT