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Crossed 500 floppy disks imaged this year and one of them was a 1987 tax return
I started a spreadsheet in January just to keep track of which disks I had run through my Greaseweazle setup, and last Tuesday it hit 500. That number caught me off guard because I figured I had maybe 80 or 90 sitting in the closet from various estate sales around Spokane. The funny part is disk 487 turned out to be someone's 1987 tax return, and it still read fine after 37 years on a shelf in a garage. What surprised me more is that about 40 of those disks needed the old cotton swab and isopropyl alcohol trick before they would read at all, and a handful only worked after a second or third try. I keep a cheap USB floppy drive around for quick checks but it choked on the really bad ones, so the flux level tools did the heavy lifting. The milestone itself is not really the point, it is more that I did not expect this many old disks to still be readable at all. Curious if anyone else keeps a running count, and what your failure rate looks like past the first few hundred.
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piper17510d ago
Bet that tax return guy never thought a stranger would read his W2s 37 years later.
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