My floppies outlived many many models of usb thumb drives. I can still read floppies I recorded 30 years ago.

My Commodore Amiga 500 floppies from the late 1980ies still work. I went nostalgic a couple months ago, booted about eight of those floppies and all worked. They were probably kept dry the hole time, but I did move several times, they were in boxes in cellars and in garages.

> were never reliable

They absolutely mog the cancerous garbage that is NAND flash memory in terms of data retention. The fact that you can pick an 1980s floppy from the junk room and read it is telling. Meanwhile your average TLC SSD will probably get wiped in 3 years if kept in the drawer, and a QLC will get wiped in 1 year.

Reliability wise floppies are also better: flash memory leaks electrons naturally and gets shredded by radiation events, with temperaure accelerating these processes. Meanwhile magnetic disks are not altered by any normal magnetic field you could produce at home.

my 1980s 5.25" disks still work. i'm surprised but they have laster a long time.

> disks have a natural expiration date and it's not long

You really have no idea what you are talking about. It's normal for floppies, especially 3.5" to last decades just sitting on a shelf. I've got 5.25" floppies from 1984, and they boot just fine on my old apple //e.

42 years in my parent's dank midwest basement.

I remember losing half the light cues for a show because we tried to reload from the 3.5" floppy and it was corrupted.

Your writing like checksums aren’t existing. They exist!

I’ve bought some 15 year old floppies recently. They work. Had just to learn, that formatting them is required. In handling they are like SD-Cards.

Which is far better than the CDs, DVDs, Bluerays or records (you now…this big black discs with a needle).

And you don’t have to worry about network attackers. And we checksum everything from the network. For good reasons.

I'd learned long ago to treat floppies like Mission Impossible tape reels, and just assume the data would self-destruct in about 5 seconds.

And yet, there’s a reason we use magnetic tape for long term archive and it’s not because usb drives are reliable.

Without having details on the specific floppy disks in question there’s no way you can authoritatively say they are unreliable. They absolutely produced floppy disks that were far more reliable than the ones sourced from the cheapest vendor possible some of us used in school back in the day. Ignoring the fact I’m guessing the disks in question aren’t having to survive life in a students backpack.

What would you have suggested in the 1980s instead of a floppy disk? And today?

If you have enough floppy disks they are a perfectly reliable solution.

And yet they’ll replace it with some cloud-native monstrosity that will get hacked by an unhinged GPT.

Say what you will about floppies. There’s something to be said for a system that’s air-gapped by default.