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...

Sounds lucky to me as my experience is the opposite. The company I used
to work for back before 2001 used to back stuff up on floppies into the
mid to late 1990s and I found a few times that when trying to retrieve
data it was corrupted and the discs were only 2-3 years old. May have
been a computer drive issue but I did try retrieving the data on a few
computers. In those days the company only used 3M Imation pre-formated
discs IIRC as they found them to be movable between many computers
drives without issue, other brands and formatting on a machine would
often not be readable on other machines reliably. Up to the mid to late
1990s IIRC we were still sending releases out to a Swiss customer on
floppies and DHLing them to Switzerland and the customer being able to
read the discs was important. I do have a few discs though which were
still readable over 15 years later last time I checked which wasn't that
recently.