How best to conserve floppy disks?

[sim085]

Hi,

When I opened my Amiga again the other year I had many floppy disks that for some reason or another no longer worked. I guess the main culprit was the quality of these floppy disks and how they where conserved (amassed on top of each other). However I had some original software floppy disks which I found still in their boxes and these did not work either.

I now have bought some more software on floppy disks and I would really like to make sure to conserve them how best I can. I do have backups of these disks on my laptop (mostly thanks to the CF adapter I have) - but I really would like to have them still working on disks as well!

Thanks for any suggestions.
Regards,
Sim085

[Lockon_15]

I'm afraid you can't do much.
Keep 'em away from known magnetic fields is a good tip said in late '90s, but now two decades later it's ridiculous. Wireless and other EM pollutants filling everything around, you can't expect that floppies would remain intact.
 
IMHO, mission impossible.
Keep the originals for display only, work out on CF backup strategy and maybe a spare internal A500 drive might be a better option.

[sim085]

Thank you Lockon_15. I'll continue to backup all the disks that still work on the CF card and then on the Laptop!

[CLS2086]

wrap in stain or aluminium steel box linked to earth ground far of every heat and electrical sources

[Damion]

I recently went through my old floppy collection, and interestingly, the only disks with errors were the same few I recall having problems with 15+ years ago. I've simply kept them upright in floppy storage cases, away from temperature extremes, dust, and moisture (dry desert climate here). My old C64 floppies worked as of a few years ago... haven't cataloged those yet on safer media, so hopefully they still work when I get around to doing it.

[ferix]

Well, the best thing you can do is to put all your floppies into a shielded and dry box...
The best shielding is a box covered (or made) with lead... But It could be hard to find one...
The "standard" shielding is an aluminium or steel box. These are easy to find (IKEA's EMU box, for example).

And for the humidity control, you can use those silica gel packs that are inclued in some electronic devices' packages.

I have all my floppies stored such way, and they seems to be right for now.

[scuzzb494]

Interestingly all my earlier floppies work no problem. The latter ones must have been poor quality and these are the ones that I continually have probs with. I copy the images of important disks to the Amiga and then put on CD. I do keep them also on the hard drive and in my Amiga Repository. All my disks are in disk boxes even the ones from the original software boxes. Dry and dust free. Also never use in dodgy drives. I have literally thousands of floppies and still find them generally reliable. More likely a drive problem when floppies start to fall over. Never give up on a disk by the way use disksalv or similar to retrieve what you can.

scuzz
http://www.commodore-amiga-retro.com