[cynicalsecurity]

Please let floppy disks die already. It was an absolute embarrassment of a technology. Hugely unreliable, fragile, offering a ridiculously small storage space. The only benefit it provided was ability to write data before flash drives and internet become widely available. Let it rest in pieces.

[forinti]

I used them a lot in the 80s and 90s and I don't ever recall losing data. Over the course of time, they will degrade, but I'm pretty sure a disk can last ten years.

The last 5.25" floppies I managed to read had about 30 years. They were kept in thick plastic sleeves sold by Acornsoft.