The last time I had a "floppy" drive, about ten years ago, I made an attempt at an inventory of the old floppys I had stored for (at that time) five to ten years. Virtually NONE of them were readable. I have, rarely, recovered data from 7 or 8 year old "flexible magnetic disks" - including ancient "floppy floppies" and 100 MB Zip disks, but our experience has been that it's rare for them to have anything readable on them after a very few years. The oldest of them actually seemed more likely to last than newer (with higher density and tiny bits) versions.

Although for a time we mailed ZIP disks back and forth with customers for data exchange - when dial-up email was too slow to send hundred page documents - we gave up on them due to poor reliability. We, and several of our trading partners, ran into a high percentage of poor quality disks that literally "ate the drives" when a disk failed.

After replacing five drives in one year, in two computers, we just took them out (and/or just quit trying to use them) and went to CDs - even though CD burners at that time were pretty clunky.

I do NOT TRUST flexible magnetic media of any kind - including ZIP disks, for data storage/archiving. During the latter part of the time when we still had some drives for them, we used them occasionally to "sneaker net" data from one machine to another, but we learned not to use them for storing data. The media just "fades" after a time.

(And the problem we found was that "three tries at reading" a "difficult" ZIP disk usually destroyed the drive, by "bending" the heads.)

IOmega, incidentally, is the source of one of my "classic stupidity" examples. The last couple of new drives that we bought came with all of the installation and setup instructions to get the machine capable of reading a ZIP disk - on a ZIP disk. (If you don't get the irony, just think about it for a bit.)

John