I was doing some cleaning on my room and I found some floppy disks, they are around 15 years old! from the Sony brand. I don't have a floppy disk device anymore on my computer, so I used an older computer because I was curious to see if they would still work.
To my surprise, they worked and all the files were accessible.
This made me think that, you could store some Bitcoin related stuff in floppy disks too? Obviously having backups in other places too.. but floppy disks may be yet another cheap way to store files. If I put my seed key in a txt (compressed in a 7z file with a pass) and my wallet.dat file on that floppy disk, it would have lasted for 15 years. I hope that if I do this, in the next 15 years when I find the floppy disks again, I will be rich
If you ever used fdd, you know that there's always a risk a bad sector develops where you don't expect and the subsequent file will get damaged.
Also, since they use magnetic surface to store data, I am amazed your data is still readable. Most of the cases that doesn't happen after 15 yr.
All in all no, your fdds are already something way better/unexpected than an average fdd. Your experiment would prove nothing, whether it'll be succesful or not (not mentioning the lack of fdd drives nowadays).
Maybe it depends on the brand. I tried some other that aren't Sony, they are some other unknown random brand, and some have corrupted files, but the Sony ones seem to be working, also some IBM ones still working fine, some other don't even show up, they make a noise but it doesn't show up anything on the files explorer, it asks me to enter a disk with the disk inside, so those are definitely dead, but most work.
Brand does matter, but this was imho a great amount of luck too.
If you really used floppy disks, you should remember that from a kit of 20-30 fdds, you always got 1-2 with CRC error.
This is hilarious. Okay first I can guess how old are you now. Second I will say, a piece of paper last for ever, even exposed to a magnet.
Not if exposed to fire though...
Floppy disks also don't do well if exposed to fire
This is hilarious. Okay first I can guess how old are you now. Second I will say, a piece of paper last for ever, even exposed to a magnet.
actually a piece of paper only lasts for a while, not forever. it is subjected to decay and based on the environment in which you are holding it this process can be speed up or slowed down. you can of course laminate the paper to prolong the life time of it.
but if you are looking for a permanent way of holding your private keys which doesn't involve electronic stuff, you should engrave it on something, the most common thing is a metal place which is resistance to corrosion.
Engraving onto metal may mean to use somebody else to do the engraving, hence you just hand out your private key to somebody.
Laminated paper wallets are not a bad solution actually. Nowadays people have printer at home and if you don't have the "laminator" (I don't know if it's actually called like this), you can buy the plastic and it
may work with the clothing iron.
