old news but interesting
isn't 'important' and 'floppy' mutually exclusive?
i liked your article, i liked the tidbit about drives tending to fail together.
all the other points i take with a large grain of salt (about what i'm worth) as you do not have evidence, only anecedotes.
the troubleshooter in me begs nick to try to read the floppys with a drive of about the same age, even better is to store them with the drive that created them. which is the moral of the story imho. but as he said, the data wasn't valuable after all...
if i had more ambition, i'd post this question: have you ever been asked to recover data from old systems that was a) mission critical and b) harder than 'a hassle' to recover. i have not and in my 15 plus years have not heard of a single case. sometimes my biggest contribution is to advocate for the secure destruction of old backup tapes, obsolete servers with raid etc.
it is easy to keep backing it up, preserving it. harder to identify it and put a value on it for the business. time and storage are money. that is the real shame of old storage media. it just keeps taking up space and being re-inventoried for years.
this article does not address any real issues but was interesting to me. too easy to say sky is falling. any trained records manager, which is what we all are, knows that data has a value and a lifetime. it is admins job to document same and provide for destruction in documented orderly way at end of life time. (sound of soap box being scraped back under kitchen counter)
