> You'd have been lucky to be able to recover those in 2001.
2001 might be a stretch but indeed they do degrade badly. During Covid I was locked down, by a stroke of bad luck, alone, 2000 kilometers away from my wife and young daughter... In the house were I grew up. My old Commodore 128 was still in the attic and I dug it out, cleaned it, cleaned (and greased) the disk drive and tried to read my 5"1/4 floppy disks.
I'd say I got about 50% success: one disk out of two was already unreadable.
One could see it as "50% success rate after 35+ years is quite good" but I fear that if I were to try now, many more would fail.
I took the opportunity to make a copy of the game Commando (which has an incredible chiptune by Rob Hubbard) on two NOS (new old stock) 5"1/4 floppies. For thankfully I had a copy a Fast Hack'em that'd still boot.
Having real time capsule stuff, re-using data from old floppies that haven't been archived since decades, is becoming near impossible.
In my experience CDs and DVDs I burned myself have a lifespan even shorter than floppies. Most of the CDs I burned in the late 90s/early 2000s are already unreadable.
2001 might be a stretch but indeed they do degrade badly. During Covid I was locked down, by a stroke of bad luck, alone, 2000 kilometers away from my wife and young daughter... In the house were I grew up. My old Commodore 128 was still in the attic and I dug it out, cleaned it, cleaned (and greased) the disk drive and tried to read my 5"1/4 floppy disks.
I'd say I got about 50% success: one disk out of two was already unreadable.
One could see it as "50% success rate after 35+ years is quite good" but I fear that if I were to try now, many more would fail.
I took the opportunity to make a copy of the game Commando (which has an incredible chiptune by Rob Hubbard) on two NOS (new old stock) 5"1/4 floppies. For thankfully I had a copy a Fast Hack'em that'd still boot.
Having real time capsule stuff, re-using data from old floppies that haven't been archived since decades, is becoming near impossible.
In my experience CDs and DVDs I burned myself have a lifespan even shorter than floppies. Most of the CDs I burned in the late 90s/early 2000s are already unreadable.