Topic: Floppy disks viable for wallet.dat storage? - page 2. (Read 3739 times)

I use floppy disks both the 3.5in (1.44 MB) and the even older 5.25in (1.2MB) as part of my wallet.dat backup procedures. The typical wallet.dat size of a few hundred KB is actually at the floppy disks sweet spot. The one big advantage is that the technology is obsolescent. In short they can be read but it would take some time to get all the parts and configure the drives etc for an attacker.  This is especially true of the older 5.25in floppies. This gives the owner of the bitcoins time to empty the wallet if the floppy is stolen or otherwise compromised making the 5.25in floppy in particular ideal for backing up an unencrypted wallet, private keys, decryption passwords etc.

Some things to keep in mind when working with floppy disks.
1) The drives are slow so be patient. Ejecting the floppy before it has finished reading / writing is one of the most common reasons for floppy disk and drive failure.
2) Keep the diskettes away from magnetic fields. A common source is unshielded speakers. For example the floppy is placed in a purse and the purse is placed next to a speaker in a car.
3) The older drives from the 1980's and early 1990's are best since they were built for quality.
4) With proper care they can hold data for decades. I have floppy disks over 20 years old that are perfectly readable today.  

Those are tape drives, which are great for backups. But they are impractical to use because tape readers are rare. They are also subject to the same problem as VHS tapes: they deteriorate over time.

No they don't. They only seem to fail randomly because of confirmation bias (vocal minority crying they lost their data).

only if you buy some shitty chinese 8 GB flash drive for $4.

10 years is pretty damn good

wait what? why wouldn't you have a printer? you can get a back and white laser printer for under $100.

Someone a few days ago in a different thread suggested m-discs as a long term storage solution.


spiccioli
 

Didn't Google use some kind of tape to store their data, even today in 2013?

One picture per floppy?

my dog chewed up the floppys with my vacation pictures on them

And of course floppies really stopped at 1.4MB I think, though there might have been one double that.

My wallet is 4MB, the thought of storing that on 3 floppies would stop me sleeping any nights!

Using a technology that is already outdated for long term storage seems contradictory.

Flash drives and/or memory cards are your best bet, I think. Never had any of those fail on me before (in contrast with harddisks, floppy disks, CDs, etc...)

You've obviously never used a floppy disk before ...... the major flaw is they are way less reliable than modern storage methods. We used to ship games on floppies, and every fifth game would come back because the data couldn't be read.

I've used flash drives extensively for 5 years and never had a corruption. Stick to flash drives. 2 in separate locations.

floppy flaws ....
I don't have any machines that has then or an interface
they are not really floppy any more
they suffer badly from magnets

Every major storage medium has a flaw in it.

• Hard Drives are known to fail randomly. Also it would be ridiculous to have a 1TB hard drive for only 1MB of data.
• Flash Drives are a nightmare when it comes to reliability.
• CD-Roms are known to "melt" over time, after ~10 years they might fail. Also inefficient to have a 700MB CD for just 1 file.
• Paper wallets are perfect, but many power users don't have a printer since it is becoming an outdated device. Also some printers may "save" the data printed making it unsafe.
  

What are the flaws with floppy disks and how do they compare with other storage mediums? Price is not a factor really since you can usually find some disks and you can get the drives for $1. I would enjoy using them because they feel more firm rather than paper or a cheap plastic flash drive.