Bitcoin Forum

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• Paper wallets are perfect, but many power users don't have a printer since it is becoming an outdated device.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.

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

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.

Using a technology that is already outdated for long term storage seems contradictory.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

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!

my dog chewed up the floppys with my vacation pictures on them :'(

One picture per floppy?

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

Someone a few days ago in a different thread suggested m-discs (http://www.mdisc.com/what-is-mdisc/) as a long term storage solution.


spiccioli
 

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.

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.  

Well I am pretty sure it will be worth the wait considering the data will be just 30-40 bytes for a single key and not a lot more for 100 or 1000.

Why don't you backup your wallet in the cloud? just upload an encrypted copy to several cloud storage sites.

Too bad no one has tape drives.

um.. i have at least one in an old 486 machine. i really can't see using them for anything. that machine hasn't been run since the first pentiums came out.

Tape drives aren't that rare. Many businesses store data on tape because they're actually quite reliable. Unlike hard drives they don't have moving parts, plus they're EXTREMELY cheap. You can get a 1.6 terabyte tape for £15 over here:
http://www.businessdirect.bt.com/products/sony-lto-ultrium-4-1-6tb-data-cart-4KNR.html?refs=56270000

Although, tapes are restricted to mostly businesses, because the tape machines are really damn expensive.

Floppies are one of the worst possible mediums for your wallet though, back on my old laptop, I had floppies that would gain bad sectors within a few days of writing something to them. They're highly volatile to data destruction just from normal use; plus floppy drives are uncommon now, my current PC doesn't even have a CD drive ( I usually use flash media for installing an operating system, and all my games come from services such as Origin and Steam. )

I would suspect a defective floppy drive on the laptop.

Perhaps think about backing it up on dropbox. As everyone has said, floppys are extremely inconsistent and offer no advantage.

You just said they fail randomly!


Sandisk Cruzer Pop 8GB failed on me 1 week after I bought it.


InkJet printers are awful because you either print every day or your ink dries up. Having a LaserJet printer in your house causes lung cancer.

If you want to be safe I suggest to multiplicate wallet.dat file into many copies to fill the mass storage (m-disc) to the limit. Then even if say >90% (depends on the storage size and luck) is corrupted, it's still possible to recover data.

If you prefer to have one solid copy use this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpOV6r2vy9Y
though I don't know if the 'printer' stores anything in the memory.

Of everything mentioned in the thread floppy disks are probably the worst for achrival.

Tape, mDisc, and specifically designed archival CD-ROM are probably your best bet along with plain old paper.
As gglon pointed out above storing the file it makes sense to store it redundantly.  There are a couple of different methods.

Lastly you really should have more than one copy as anything no matter how well designed can fail.  Take a wallet.dat expand it to say 5,000 key keypool put one copy on a mDisc, one copy encrypted in the cloud, and a printout of private keys on paper and with proper storage I would be confident it can be recovered in 10-30 years.

You do realize that with deterministic wallets, you will only have to backup once, right? So all of this discussion is pointless.

learn to read. i said them only seem to fail randomly.

and none of my flash drives ever failed for me. your point? (hint: anecdotal evidence sucks)

That's why I said laser printer. Also [citation needed] on laser printers causing lung cancer.

Dude, never heard of SMART before?

What about backup media? CDs/DVDs made for purpose of backup, costs a little more but can survive hundred years. Combined with some redundancy.

And what about LTO tapes? DAT tapes?

And even encrypted clouds???

And floppies? These are good for this: http://youtu.be/16vcIUY_bAE

EDIT: And the ultimate #1 storage: human brain  :D

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_printing#Safety_hazards.2C_health_risks.2C_and_precautions

There are some health risks of laser printers. The question is, how severe are they.

but his claim was "Having a LaserJet printer in your house causes lung cancer.". Worst case scenario: they emit as much particles as a cigarette. not bad, considering you're not printing something every day..

Yes and you can also encrypt private key to different strong algorithm using crypo.com

You can also watermark some image with your privatekey or hide privatekey inside a image.
or
Get it engraved on some stuff.

I keep 1 junk coin backed up by engraving on a 10 Kilo Gold Bar.

Seems legit.

Paper works for a few hundred years.

In case you use a HD wallet, you might just print the encrypted master seed as a QR code, that is just 32 bytes. An indexing server like BOP can find all transactions referring to addresses derivable from the seed in seconds and recreate the wallet, ready to use. I assume this will be even simpler soon and be part of other implementations too.

Same here, although the reason none look like private keys, is because I don't actually write down private keys, I just write down really long random-looking phrases, which I input into liteaddress.org to get the private key.

eg. This could hold some litecoins:

Hidding the data in plain sight is by far the best deal possible

(6vUBR2kdNTuPTPfWdzhYHU7EzSxFgQ5SVhPMRtBLxKAk1QhuaBD)

You don't need to store the wallet.dat in the floppy. Just the private keys in a text file. Export using pywallet or similar tool. Then use rar or zip with 10% recovery record. Then make multiple copies of the file.

This is what I just did for experiments:
1. use vanitygen to make 200 private keys with 1Dabs prefix. Took a few minutes. Stopped. Saved to text file.
2. clean up file a bit. total size 25,295 bytes or 25 kb.
3. use RAR to make rar file of single text file with 10% recovery record. size result = 17,542 bytes or 17 kb. keys-20130623.rar
4. copy rar file 20 times. named Copy of keys-20130623.rar, up to Copy (20) of keys-20130623.rar total size = 359 kb.

That 359 kb fits on a 5.25 inch floppy. You have 22 copies of the keys in RAR format with 10% recovery record. Each.

If you use a 3.5 inch floppy, you can fit more.
If you use a CD-ROM, you can fit even more.
If you use a USB flash drive, you can fit a whole lot more.

Those will last years, and I'm sure you can recover something even if 50% of the files get corrupted.

You do realize that multiple copies and recovery records only protects against bad sectors. If the storage medium is damaged physically, you would likely not be able to recover data. Same goes for any wear-and-tear damage that causes total failure of the medium. Cloud storage, on the other hand, has better reliability than any physical medium (probably because they use enterprise drives and keep backups).

Yes I do. The multiple copies on one media is only for that one media. You will want multiple floppies, or multiple USB drives, in multiple locations.

And of course, encrypted in the cloud, in your gmail account, in your yahoo account, in your dropbox account.