Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uflorida!ukma!rutgers!sunybcs!boulder!pratt
From: pratt@boulder.Colorado.EDU (Jonathan Pratt)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Have you checked your floppies lately?
Message-ID: <8455@boulder.Colorado.EDU>
Date: 28 Apr 89 17:20:24 GMT
References: <28718@apple.Apple.COM> <328@torch.UUCP>
Sender: news@boulder.Colorado.EDU
Reply-To: pratt@boulder.Colorado.EDU (Jonathan Pratt)
Organization: University of Colorado, Boulder
Lines: 31

In article <328@torch.UUCP> paul@torch.UUCP (Paul Andrews) writes:
>
>I've worked in this industry for nigh on 10 years and in my experience
>roughly 1 out of 5 floppies will fail after 6 months.
>
My own experience suggests that this is somewhat pessimistic.  With hundreds
of disks in the last 10 years I've only had about five develop errors.  And
usually they gave warning signals, such as failing the first initialization,
or making a lot of noise in the drive.  I've always bought inexpensive disks
too, though I admit I've found Sony's to be the best.

>The moral of this story is: make more than one backup of the same data
>if it is REALLY critical.
>
If it's REALLY critical you should also consider keeping copies in a
completely separate location, ie., another building.

>As chuq writes. If you EVER discover a floppy with a media error, throw
>it away.

OK, I admit I'm pretty cheap.  When I find disks with bad blocks I
initialize them with a utility that turns off the bad sectors.  After
that they work fine.  My own conclusion is that you're pretty safe as
as long as you make regular incremental backups of important work.

Jonathan

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