Never? Hah. Happened regularly.

That said it was such a convenient excuse that I suspect the majority of cases were of the "dog ate my homework" type.

I think I had ~5 defective floppies (all 1440K) ever on a total of about 40 - one or two each between assorted names I got with a VideoWriter as a kid, some Sonys that we bought with our first PC in 2001, a 10-pack of Verbatims I bought around 2004 (red and white labels), and some lightly-used-in-2005 Dysans I got in 2021...

Of course I threw away pretty much all of those in 2010 or so since they usually failed Microsoft's formatter and most had trouble with MyFormat too - turned out (in 2021) it was the drive 😠

Never had a problem when I used those Verbatims in middle school, even today I have the color printouts and I could even recreate it as someone, barely a year ago, posted a mirror of the freeware ProgeCAD LT 2006 we used 😀

Dysan and generic brands.

Cheers,

Kahenraz wrote on 2023-03-16, 07:17:

I'm certain that I have written documents for school assignments to disk, only to discover later that the file was corrupted or unreadable on school computers. This was always distressing, because it was very common at the time for students to bring their assignments in to school to print, as home printers were not as commonplace or expensive. I certainly never had my own personal printer until after college; at home we eventually got a single "family" printer, which was it connected to my personal computer. In college, the cost a printer and ink was prohibitive on my budget, so I would use the printers at school.

Interesting. I always had a printer at home, and I think bringing in disks from home to use at school would have been frowned on for virus/warez reasons. But I don't think it would have been that practical anyway--ClarisWorks and something called "Student Writing Center" at school; MS Works and WP5.x at home. And Mac format at school and PC at home (so, not understanding the nuances, home disks could be read at school but school (HFS) disks not at home).

Yeah am ancient and they did not allow anyone bringing floppy media from home. Well to clarify my first year high school had a main frame and teletype+line printer. Ohh the fun of a ticker tape for storing and reading your programming 😁
added just like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beQlLqa9kzQ
Even in college early 1980's they did not allow it 🤣

Hmmm, didn't happen to me in unrecoverable fashion until post 2000 when we got a box of extremely crappy Memorex in neon colors. Nearly all of those went bad in months. However copies were still on HDD. Prior to that, retail purchased disks seemed quite reliable and took some abuse. If there was difficulty reading anything usually scandisk, chkdsk etc fixed it, or taking it to a "great" floppy drive like a Panasonic JU series and hitting retry lots of times usually got it. One situation I did have come up is one of the drives in the house was gradually going out of alignment and ended up writing floppies another drive couldn't read. That ended up corrupting some sneakernet disks in use.

Bulk floppies were another matter, unformatted, you might find 2 bad per 50, really cheap unformatted could be as bad as 5-8 per 50, but you'd also have to beware of scam artists packing all THEIR format failures in bulk and selling them suspiciously cheap, and you'd be lucky you'd get one good one in the whole lot. Anyway once you got them formatted they'd be as reliable as others, i.e. top tier reliable as retail pack top tier and so on, lower tiers were better if you didn't delete and rewrite a lot.

I guess I was usually pretty lucky with them, mostly I guess due to giving it that extra second to make sure it finished writing, giving my drive heads a clean once in a while, carrying them in cases. Avoiding viruses was a big thing too, several will put a fake bad block to hide in at a specific position on the disk no matter what you have on there. Buh-bye file that was on it.

I had lots of 3.5" 2MB floppies fail, brand new, because I used to buy super cheap white box floppies. It was all I could afford, at the time.

- Alex

I'm just going to toss this out there because I just spent several hours spread over two days testing 3.5" disks from a huge lot I was given years ago. The guy was a teacher from either the late 80s or early 90s through the 2000s, so it was mostly useless stuff... class assignments or copies of programs that are easily found online. Some of it was stuff he actually programmed and used for class, which is neat so I kept it, even though it's probably of little use now. More interesting were disks that contained programs, games, drivers, etc. downloaded from a BBS or Compuserve. There weren't many, but there were some. Along with those were SEVERAL partial sets of old Microsoft disks, most of which have been written over at some point.

Anyway... to read them I was using a Dell FDDM-101 USB floppy drive on Windows 10 and cleaning it frequently with a cleaning disk. My findings are that the oldest 720K disks were perfectly readable about 90% of the time! It was very easy to tell that the disks themselves are heavier and more solid feeling, and I have noticed this on other 720K disks I own. The 1.44MB disks however were probably 80% bad (either wouldn't read or had errors). The majority of the bad disks were either repurposed retail disks (surprising) or were generic non-branded disks (not surprising). Of the ones that read very easily and I decided to keep, about a dozen were generic 1.44MB disks but most of those were obviously older (usually beige) ones that were more solid. A few were name brand disks... Sony, Fujifilm, IBM. And about 10 were 720K disks (mixed brands or unmarked).

As for failures experienced back in the day... well. I didn't use floppies a ton personally, but I remember my brother having issues with them failing to read seemingly randomly. Before we had dial-up at our house we used to go to my Uncle's house with a pile of floppies so we could download game patches, editors, mods, etc. and bring them back home. This was probably ~1997, so it's likely that the quality of the disks was pretty low, and I'm sure we reused some old retail\game disks. I remember some files just not reading back off the disk. I was definitely not experienced with this stuff back then though, so I don't have much more detailed memories than that.

A bit later (early to mid 2000s) I vaguely remember having disks fail to read back something I expected to be there, but I didn't do a lot of serious work with them at the time. I currently have disks that have had the same files on them for 20-30+ years that read just fine. Some of them came from my sister's Smith Corona word processor that she used in the early to mid 90s (it was one of the odd ones that was like an actual computer with a monitor). Those are 720K disks and have always worked as far as I know, and continue to read to this day.

Lots of anecdotes. 😁

I've used hundreds of discs, and only had about 10% failure rate over a 30 year period. I still have a small pile of failing floppies that I plan to try and resurrect once I finish organising after a home more (massive piles of boxes, and very little idea where anything is - been looking for my printer, which has "disappeared" somewhere in one of the piles 😀 )

I had about the same failure rate back in the mid 2000s when I first bought floppy disks new, as I do now with various older disks I've bought (maybe 10-20%).

i've got bad sectors marked on a number of 3.5 hd floppies. i still continue to use them without any more problems that couldn't happen to a pristine floppy. i'm sure i lost files, but nothing i ever considered important.

as i understand it there's really only 1 guy still selling 'new' floppies which all the resellers buy from and it's all old stock from the 2000's. i read that he lamented stocking up equally with 5.25 and 3.5 stock since the 5.25 stock has been a poor seller in comparison.

I guess I'm gonna find out how good Sony DSDD (720) are quicker than anything else, I've only got 8, and been using them to transfer to XT portable, and I wanna get my turbo XT out which also needs DSDD.

HD I've got the remains of a 50 box, and 2 sealed boxes of 10... though I feel cheated, my stocking up was stymied by an interfering SIL... an office store was closing up end of noughts, I have a HDD, ODD, various other goodies and several 50 packs of floppies that they were blowing out at $5... my SIL randomly turns up.. the cashout line is long as hell and I've only solidly got hold of other bits and one floppy box.... she snatches couple boxes away from me saying "Why are you buying those? I've got tons of floppies", and I can't get them back without losing place, and she's still trying to pry the last box off me, and people are glaring now, because my voice is getting louder, tell her I am damn well keeping one box to have brand new reliable floppies and she damn well better give me her floppies... then it's my turn to cash out.... for various reasons, didn't see her again for a month, then I ask for her floppies. "Oh, threw them out, didn't think you were interested since you still bought some" took some damn deep breaths to stop me from punching her.

Hah, a pox on Memorex, thought their translucent Neony colors were the crappy ones, but just found a solid color Memorex that won't read, memorex now gonna get called Alzheimerex round here.

We got our first PC in '95 so just as I was 1/2 way though high school.
Homework was always printed out as only computers in the school was the classroom. Computer studies we would have handed work such as qbasic programs on disk. but seem to remember having to provide a printed copy as well, I suppose as proof we had done the work.

We were allowed to bring disks to school though with school computers acting as a middle man for copying games. Someone would bring a game zipped over a number of disks and copy it to the school PC harddrive. Then a number of kids would copy those files onto floppies from home. It was very common that at least 1 disk in that set would get a bad sector bouncing around in a school bag all day meaning it may take 3 or 4 attempts to actually get the complete archive set home before you could extract it.

We always used 1.44MB disks from KMart, Brand was something like Computec?

When I left school and went to TAFE (Kind of a collage run by Australian state government's) was relatively new campus that had Zip 100 drives in each PC which would have been the last time I stored/transferred important data on anything less then a CD