My 5.25s are in "cross my fingers" basement storage in bankers boxes lined with plastic bags to keep moisture out of them. I hadn't really intended to leave them more than a year or two, but it's been over a decade.

Had a couple hundred 5.25 stored in basement as they were, in a cardboard box.
A good 20% are gone and I'm not stressing about it (games readily available online and some office programs).
Another batch I bought to make an epoxy coffee table are waiting in a box in my house, and only 5 of the hundred+ are readable and formatted @128K (but fail to write any files) (I was curious and ill, had to make time pass so I tested them).

3.5 were stored in the house and are good mostly but had a few failing over the years (35 to 20yrs old).

My experience with 5.25 320k medium is that they're far more reliable than 3.5. I bought a weird collection of utilities and games from basically a grab bag at a scrap store a few years ago and every single "ibm formatted" disk was read 100%. I mean none of them looked particularly bad and most had sleeves, but still. To have them all readable (about 30 disks) literally from a bin in a dusty store was pretty wild.

So it's more of an organizational thing to me than anything else, mainly to keep blank media separated and secure, keep handwritten disks I might have accidentally bought in a lot separate from other stuff, shareware distros cataloged together, etc.

Most of the time it seems a complete gamble on substrate quality, magnetic material quality and coating quality, combined with how strong the head of the drive that wrote to them was... which all applies to how fast they "age out" even in perfect conditions. For instance, what should have been the youngest box of floppies in the house, bought sometime late noughties, had 2 or 3 used for resumes, 7 still in the plastic case, sitting in a metal filing cabinet, in an air conditioned office area.... total write off, none of the files readable if you can even tell there's one or two there, 50% bad sectors pluse, corrupted FAT, and the unused ones just the same... (Memorex multi colored translucent pack, avoid them.) then there's some "polaroid" branded ones, have been workshop donkeys on and off for 2 decades, kicking around in the open, down on the basement bench too, maybe bought in the late 90s, coffee stains on them, have to physically clean them sometimes before I let them anywhere near a drive, sat on top of running CRTs, probably had magnetic screwdrivers and bits rolling over them.... annnd 2 bad sectors max, read perfect, think maybe they've had the 2 bad sectors since first format, or after checkdisk after some heavy writes and deletes ages ago.

I've bought new old stock games a few years back from discount stores and found the floppies dead at ~5 years old, I've bought late 1980s "well used" looking games and the floppies read fine.

So IMO you've gotta really, really screw up, get them super mouldy or try to pick them up with the scrapyard's car magnet, before it makes as much as 10% difference in how long they last. I mean you can blame yourself for not providing a dry nitrogen atmosphere and velvet pillows when you find a dead one, it might not have made a difference either way.

Before you put strange disks in your precious drives,

1) make sure the floppy media turns smoothly in the case. If it doesn't you may damage the drive motor. (The motor will overheat and stop working. It is not necessarily broken, but you will have to wait a while for it to become useable again.)

2) manually turn the floppy media and inspect it for mold or other dirt. Carefully remove this with iso alcohol

3) if testing large numbers of disks, you will need to periodically clean the drive heads. Use iso alcohol and lint-free brush or cloth. Take care not to knock the heads out of alignment.

Also with strange disks come presents... I've found the stoned virus in about 1 in 5 batches of randoms... there was another one I discovered also, but not remembering what it was. The MSAV with 6.x MSDOS versions can find 99% of the "classics"

This is all good info, thanks.

But like... organization? I have to think there was a better way in the 80s and 90s for software houses to catalog floppies.

They are perishable, nothing you can do will make them last.

These kinds of floppy boxes worked fine for me gor 3.5":

Not exactly hundreds (though there are bigger ones), but you can fit several dozens of floppies. Otherwise I just use actual cardboard floppy boxes.

I also have a 5,25" plastic box, but it's more for transportation rather than storage. It can't fit more than 3 or 4 disks. I just use the cardboard box. I don't have all that many disks, so storage isn't an issue.

Just to wrap up - found a few items after about 6 hours of searching, both expensive for what they are and what I need them for, but seem to be the best options available.

First:

This is far more expensive than it should be, it's just plastic. However, it's just the right size for 5.25 floppies and can probably store up to 1k disks. It also comes with dividers (I think only 1 per drawer, but better than nothing).
Link to item

Second:

This is pretty expensive for a "hobbyist", but probably the best for anyone doing medium- to large-scale archiving or production with floppies. I'm aiming at probably something along these lines eventually. The rail-type dividers can be adjusted to fit quite a few rows of floppies.
Link to item

rasz_pl wrote on 2022-02-17, 07:15:

They are perishable, nothing you can do will make them last.

True but humans are also perishable. My disks just need to outlast me.

Plasma wrote on 2022-02-17, 17:11:

rasz_pl wrote on 2022-02-17, 07:15:

They are perishable, nothing you can do will make them last.

True but humans are also perishable. My disks just need to outlast me.

Paraphrasing Agent Smith: No, your disks are already dead.

I have floppies that are 40 years old and work fine.

I don't know if this any helpful, but news paper turned out to be good for preserving books, VHS cassettes and 3,5"/5,25" diskettes.

a) My father has some floppies from the 1980s that were (still are) stored in cardboxes that were in turn wrapped into old newspapers.
They are still stored that way in the attic and the floppies are all fine.

b) VHS cassettes. My father and me threw out the family's VHS tapes way back in the 2000s.
That means, we stored them in the garage. It's an ugly garage made of concrete with just a few holes for ventilation.
To our surprise, all the cassettes, except one (Bambi), are in perfect condition..
We stored them in big cardboard boxes filled with dozen of old newspapers (bottom, uppwr side, etc).
- We spent the last two weaks watching some of the old recordings we made in 2002, too.
ST Voyager, Spellbinder, TNG, etc. 😁

c) Books. My father did wrap up his old, ancient books (radio, electronics) into newspapers decades ago. They're still fine, neither brittle nor browned.

dumpsterac1d wrote on 2022-02-17, 01:23:

This is all good info, thanks.

But like... organization? I have to think there was a better way in the 80s and 90s for software houses to catalog floppies.

Yes, there were special cabinets for diskettes, tapes etc.

Here's an example. For 3,5" and 5,25" floppies.
Manufacturer was Boeder in Germany, I vaguely remember.
Was common among C64 users, I believe.

But there must be more like these cabinets and made from metal, too.

Edit: Universities and data centers of the 60s/70s/80s surely had professional storage for 8" and 5,25" floppies, too!
The 5,25" ones should fit Jevel Cases (CDs), too.

In north american environmental conditions, I would specifically caution against attic storage, as solar heat gain in June, July, August can have attics at temperatures that may damage lower quality plastics (have them shrivel, distort or sag) ... I would also caution against using tin roofed sheds, shipping containers for the same reasons, unless they are very well vented to maintain equilibrium with ambient air temperatures. Newspapers are not so common these days, and also I would worry about having rats or other rodents nesting in the newspaper if used in cardboard boxes in outbuildings.

Jo22 wrote on 2022-02-17, 20:55:

Yes, there were special cabinets for diskettes, tapes etc. […]
Show full quote

dumpsterac1d wrote on 2022-02-17, 01:23:

This is all good info, thanks.

But like... organization? I have to think there was a better way in the 80s and 90s for software houses to catalog floppies.

Yes, there were special cabinets for diskettes, tapes etc.

Here's an example. For 3,5" and 5,25" floppies.
Manufacturer was Boeder in Germany, I vaguely remember.
Was common among C64 users, I believe.

But there must be more like these cabinets and made from metal, too.

Edit: Universities and data centers of the 60s/70s/80s surely had professional storage for 8" and 5,25" floppies, too!
The 5,25" ones should fit Jevel Cases (CDs), too.

I still have 1 for 5.25, but my father gave away 2 for 3.5.
I'm still weeping, they were fantastic and stackable.

The cheap ones of those weren't so hot... always had the hinge pegs popping out, or the top was brittle and split at the holes.... Some of them had excess width too and dead space at the ends and over the top of the disks such that you needed basically twice the volume to accommodate them... i.e. one shelf full of 10 packs would need two shelves to store them in those.

Plasma wrote on 2022-02-17, 18:57:

I have floppies that are 40 years old and work fine.

I have humans that are 40 years old and work fine.

- That's not what she said.

Quality is paramount. Even 30 years old 3.5 TDK work perfectly while 10 years old I bought are all dead. Even the spring would come off and jam the driver 🤣