Best way to ensure DD floppies survive another 20 years

[Xnyle]

Hi Forum ;-)

I just transfered 95% of my old A500 floppies into ADFs, so far so good, 95% still good after 20 years and I doubt they were 100% good when I stashed them 20 years ago.

Now as it is often stated, floppies reach the end of their lifespan at about 20 years, how can I maximize the probability that 20 years from now on  I will still be able to play games on the original hardware using original floppies?

Basically I've two options handling my floppies:

1. Leave them as they are, just stash them in an arid dark spot again.
2. Rewrite them before stashing them again.

Problem is, I don't know/understand if rewriting them makes things worse or better.
Do they start to fail because they demagnetize, or because the underlying floppy disk starts to disintegrate?

Any opinion appreciated ;-)

[Xnyle]

Thanks for all the comments.

Seems I did everything right so far, stored in a dry clean cellar, always around 15 centigrade, dry, upright in a disk box. I'll just put them back there then.

Just for clarification:

Main problems are humidity and adhesives, not demagnetization?

But still: will it do any harm to a currently good disk to rewrite it?

If you try to re-write data to "refresh" an old disk which is shedding oxide, you'll probably end up with a worse problem (as every time the drive head touches the disc surface it will do more damage).

I already read all the disks, so the drive head was already there and the disk seems to be good.

So in this particular case, rewrite or not? Question is simply when will natural demagnetization hit? If it's in 100 years on average, I obviously don't want to rewrite them, if it's 30 years on average, I probably want to rewrite them.


Besides, I just made 20 copies of the original Workbench disk, hopefully one survives.

[Xnyle]

Exactly. I guess the newest DD floppies are at least 15 years old now?

If I buy them now they are probably in worse shape then my own ones.

I could use new HD floppies, as there is still one manufacturer, but from what I read data on them won't hold for long?

[Xnyle]

@Thorham thx, already found that solution, but it's just not the same.

If I go down that road, why not just dump the whola Amiga, buy a RPI und flash Retropie. Because it's not he same. Retro should include floppies ;-)