Most people with security constraints have long since moved on to optical media (CDr and DVDr), but even those are starting to become hard to find. Optical media has the advantage of having write-once modes which makes it easier to avoid cross contaminating data. The workflow is very straightforward, burn the disc, run it through the dedicated virus scanner, copy the data on the target platform, toss the disc in the shredder. The cost of each disc is negligable, especially if you start counting the man-hours wasted waiting on that incredibly slow floppy interface.

Not in my experience. I have floppies 40 years old that haven't lost a byte.

40 years indicates you're probably using 5¼" (or larger!) media which is slightly better at media decay due to lower densities.

Although as a precaution, I long ago copied them en masse to CDROMs. Later, the CDROMs got copied to hard disks.

I gave away my PDP-11 long ago, but not before I copied the 8" floppies it had (circa 1980). But one day I realized I had neglected to copy a critical file. I had the floppies, but no way to copy them. Then I remembered a friend of mine, Shal Farley, might still have an -11. Calling him up, sure enough, he had it but hadn't fired it up in years and was about to dispose of it. I mailed him the floppies.

He fired up the -11, it still worked fine, and the floppies all copied perfectly. My entire box of floppies, every byte.

A big thanks to Shal and his company, Cheshire Engineering.

(The missing file was one of the source files to Empire for the PDP-11, which I have now backed up on https://github.com/DigitalMars/Empire-for-PDP-11 )

Overwhelming majority of the disks were readable. I have about 15-20 that aren't... and many of them may be formatted Mac 800k which I am not able to read out right now, rather than corrupted.

This even includes many DD disks that were formatted as HD by my PS/2 that just didn't care. Was a slight hassle to get newer drives to ignore the absence of the density hole and read them out.

The bigger problem is that almost all the interesting data I'd want from that era was generally overwritten by dumb stuff. Why keep old papers and source code from when I was a "baby", when a friend was offering a copy of a game?

Maybe consumer floppies were of a lower quality than published ones? I don’t know if that’s true but I do remember having a really low success rate with consumer floppies (it got so bad I’d often write two floppies just in case).

I think stray magnetic fields were more of a problem back then. Fridge magnets, magnetic clasps on wallets and bags, magnetic clasps on notebooks and binders, etc. There were lots of hidden opportunities for corruption.

These days, nobody worries about the mag stripe on their credit card getting wiped. But it was an active concern back then.

I'm more annoyed when a store doesn't take Apple Pay. The clerks always seem embarrassed when I ask because I'm sure I'm the 900,000th person to inquire. I find it so odd that the Krogers in two cities I've been to recently don't do contactless payments at all.

I do remember cassettes had different quality magnetic strips but I don’t know if the same was ever true for disks too… so it’s probably bonkers. I’m just throwing some ideas around without much thought. :)

It might just be a case that college kid me was less careful with his disks than you were.

More recently though, I have unboxed my old collection of 3” (not 3.5” but literally 3 inch) floppies for the Amstrad CPC 464 and they almost all worked despite being nearly 40 years old. So I definitely believe you when you post about your success rate.

When you're only reading 1.44 megs of data, speed isn't that big a deal.

Very fun times storing your home-work on a disk, bringing the disk to school and being unable to read it. Very common problem.

I never had that while growing up. Used floppies for ~6 years, since school computers were ancient, no usb, and the cd drives always struggled to read home burned cds.. Floppies worked 100% regardless of brand or drive.

In 6 years I had 1 floppy suddenly die on me.. which I thought was really weird.. Otherwise I'd carry around in my backpack 1-3, until they'd get physically damaged or start making new noises, that's how I knew it's time to replace them.

I started using them as a kid, but probably after the world had moved on (I liked to tinker, and usually free computers were old computers)

Part of me wonders if the quality was "A shaped", where early disks were experimental, then reliable but expensive disks became common, then cheap but maybe not as reliable disks became even more common

In general, failed floppies weren't a weekly occurrence or anything like that. But a floppy that couldn't be read or at least developed bad sectors was not rare either.

And if you don't want to use USB... well good luck finding a modern motherboard with a floppy disk interface. These days you obviously have to use a USB floppy disk readers. The argument of not using USB doesn't make a lot of sense, USB is not dangerous, it's how the OS is configured. Also how do you plug in mouse and keyboard, with PS2? And by the way, if you don't want to use USB at all you can use an SD card (you can find readers that are PCI express and thus don't require USB), or a CD ROM with a SATA reader, or a SATA HDD with an hotswap caddie, etc.

Is the Tokyo police going to "design" their own floppy format? Why!?

This is most likely the effect of some luddite in a leadership position that simply can't handle change but has been able to force everyone to comply for decades. Floppies in 2020? Really? Maybe this will be embarrassing enough that they'll upgrade.

It happens though, there was a story some years back about an HVAC filter company (Sparkle) that ran much of their business operations on late 1950's IBM hardware that used plug-boards. Plug-boards! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14121527

It's much more likely that they have an established set of procedures on how to handle day to day operations that involves floppies, and that they didn't see the point of changing the procedures that already work for them.