[digler999]

What I meant was if you expect them to die, and discard them on some regimented schedule instead of expecting them to last forever. Flash-based USB storage (and even platter-based HDDs ) suffer degradation and/or bitrot, just at different rates/probabilities. Even optical media only has a few years of expected lifetime.

[Piskvorrr]

Of course there's bit rot everywhere, just that floppies were notoriously unreliable because of it.

OTOH, the only way to actually preserve data is to keep rolling them forward to new physical media as the old ones die off (this is of course abstracted away in cloud solutions).