Winter disks, Summer disks

[Ral-Clan]

So I'm reviving an A500 with a sidecar hard-drive. I'm loading it up with software from my old floppy collection.

Now, I haven't used actual floppies in about four years, since I'm mostly using a UAE system for productivity work and everything is installed to hard drive and ocassionally I use ADF floppy images.

But since I'm loading up this A500, I pulled out my old "real" floppies. Years ago I had backed them all up to ADF images burned onto CD-Rs I kept in the house - so I never really needed the original floppies until installing to this real A500 - as it was less time consuming using the original disks then re-writing all the software to back to floppies from ADFs.

First the Workbench floppies, in order to do the initial installation of the OS.  These floppies were stored in a box in the house (supposedly) to keep them safe and readable.  I wanted to be sure I always had at least one bootable Workbench disk. But still - many had read-write errors.  Many of these could not even be formatted to be re-used.

I had also kept a few special favourite games in this indoor storage box. A quarter to half of them had errors on the disks too.

Then came time to install the general "applications" and games. Those came from a disk storage caddy that had been kept in the loft of my outdoor shed in the backyard for the past four years.

These floppies had not been protected from temperature changes or humidy in any way.  Where I live the temperature fluctuates from 35 degrees Celcius with high humidity to negative 15 degrees Celcius in the winter, with extreme dryness.

Guess what - not one read-write error on those disks yet.

So take from that what you will...

[kedawa]

Floppies don't seem to follow the rules.
When I got back into using Amigas a few years ago, I bought some NOS DD floppies, since that's what everyone recommends.  About 7/10 wouldn't even format.  These were brand new discs, still sealed, that had been on a surplus store shelf for 20 years.
A few months ago, I found a bunch of PC HD floppies in an e-waste bin, and almost every single one works perfectly on my Amiga.  Every disk that managed to format properly has been completely error free.