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From: derek@leah.albany.edu (Cinderella Man)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc
Subject: Re: Dead floppies
Summary: ditto
Message-ID: <1990Dec21.161038.11141@sarah.albany.edu>
Date: 21 Dec 90 16:10:38 GMT
References: <10547@ilog.UUCP>
Sender: news@sarah.albany.edu (News Administrator)
Organization: Computin' Fools, SUNY Albany
Lines: 35

In article <10547@ilog.UUCP> skyvingt@ilog.UUCP (William Skyvington) writes:
>The rate at which my floppies have been dying over the last year,
>since I've been working on several IIcx machines, is outrageous.

     I too have been encountering FAR more unreadable floppies over
the past year or so, both 800K and 1.4MB.  I can state this objectively
because I'm the person Mac users campuswide come to with their problems,
and the number of trashed disks has been increasing slowly but steadily.
This is machine-independent:  SE, IIcx, IIci, IIfx, all are about equal.


>Frankly, I've reached the point at which I've lost all confidence in
>Macintosh floppies.

     Ditto here.  I bring graphic work and documentation between home
and work all the time, and I now make two copies of everything I transport,
because the likelihood of a trashed disk is high enough.  I've had a Mac
since September 1984, and I _used_ to be able to count on a disk for two,
even three years -- my old disks, just sitting at home, are still good.

     This is NOT to say that I can't recover disks or files.  I have an
85% success rate with SUM and/or MacTools Deluxe's Rescue (and I really
want to order a copy of 1st Aid), so the problems are usually not 
unresolvable.  Still, it's the frequency of the problem that gets to me.

     By the way, my working hypothesis is that it's the library door
scanners producing a large enough field to scramble data.  It's the
most common point we all walk through.  And I keep my disks free of dust,
so it's not simple media scratches.

>William Skyvington

                                                Derek L.
--
wishing I used WORM CDs for data transport...