[delayed]

I've had some bad sectors on a high-desnity 5.25 floppy go away after blowing dust off.

Do they? or is it low quality media? Rather than judging old tech bad, new tech good we should look at the requirements and tradeoffs. The failure modes of the new replacement system look more catastrophic to me, relying on cloud infra and internet links.

I can't find information about how the disks are used specifically, how often they are read, written, what data they are used for, if they can be replaced by floppy emulators, etc.

12 billion for a new system that might not actually be an improvement is a lot of money.

I was told some 30 years ago that floppy disks only last for a couple of years

I have some 3.5" floppy disks in the bench seat of the electric organ that came with my house that are at least that old... the three I tried worked without issue. Small sample size, but it suggests a half-life way over a couple of years; I can't imagine this system has unusually robust error correction or anything.

I recently tried to copy over an old box of floppies from the 80s and 90s. I'd say 80-90% success rate.

Floppies aren't a bad technology, but they do have limits.

I doubt that SD cards will last that long.

You've found the positive side to the fact that our government with budgets for all the money in the world can't seem to stay within 30 years of up to date technically.

If we give them more money, this is sure to improve! Monopolies and all ...

The problem is, with what media would you replace them with if you had to replace them somewhere between then and now? iomega zip drives? Jaz drives? CF cards? sony memory sticks? rewritable cds/dvds? Imation superdisks?

Agree. For a purpose-built system that is only used by trained professionals, being "up to date" really means nothing. There's only fitness for purpose.

But the cost of switching -- mainly thoroughly certifying the replacement system, retraining, and the risks of an error happening during one of those processes causing a catastrophe -- that's real.

There's no point in upgrading the storage mechanisms of arbitrary systems, or completely redoing the whole system from scratch on new hardware which would be the case here, unless it yields measurable improvements in fitness for purpose to balance against the switching costs.

there's no such thing as air gapping when people are involved.

The weather records have to be written to the floppy from an online device at some point in the pipeline.

What is more likely is that the workflow has been compromised at some time, but due to lack of data integrity checks, it was never detected.