Are floppy disks safe to store wallets?

[Harpua]

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...

You just honestly have to be mindful of were you are keeping these keys stored, because if not you are bound for a very dreadful day ahead of you.  I honestly don't think of it being that bad if you had some other precious things you need to store in safe place; to put those things in a deposit box at your trusted bank and keep the cold wallet storage paper along with it.

Then in that case, all you have to do is keep the public address with you on hand so you can continually send funds to it as you please, as sort of a "savings plan".

[Kakmakr]

Wow, you brought back some memories with this thread. We started out with magnetic tape and moved over from that to floppy and stiffy discs. The floppy discs were very fragile and error prone, but the Stiffy's was much better. We even drilled a hole in the stiffy's to double it's capacity to 1.44 mb.

From my experience from back then, I would not recommend it, because it gave CRC read errors frequently. ^hmmm^

[azguard]

FD man this is good
i have some driver and disk (believed or not they are still working) and i dont know what to say about storing wallet on floppy seem little off cuz is old and not so reliable and fragile were
store on something else even now dvd disk are not reliable so i dont know what to say about it (i can send you disk that is old enough when is stored my ms dos 6.22 confid for games back in the days with 622kb free memory after reboot)

best advice is to store on several mediums like paper usb some ghost drive or something else dont use floppy

[avikz]

Don't use floppy disk to store your .dat file as the floppy readers are already extinct from the market.

If your current floppy disk reader goes dead, you will loose everything you are going to store there.

Better, use some current technology to store your bitcoins safely.

[Pursuer]

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.

[NeuroticFish]

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.

[lottery248]

safe, but the key can be unsafe because the floppy are worse than HDD about the writing errors, if failed to read well then your key is gone.
for the Qt wallet, you will even need at least 30000 of them for the blockchain, the monster of space. 

[BitsandBites]

I do not think that floppy disks are pretty safe to store your coins on because they are pretty old now. There are much better things were you can store your Bitcoins on like an usb stick. Some people even safe there coins on there phones.

[MyBTT]

Floppy disks are very outdated and they are very unreliable when it comes to storing files. Paper wallets are probably better for storing them, and even USBs are bad but not as bad as floppy disks.

[Dekker3D]

safe, but the key can be unsafe because the floppy are worse than HDD about the writing errors, if failed to read well then your key is gone.
for the Qt wallet, you will even need at least 30000 of them for the blockchain, the monster of space.  

He just have to store only the private key to encrypted files, so he just have to import/sweep private key later
So, you just need a floppy disks.

Also, i doubt he can found floppy disk reader

Even physically its unreliable. It can easily get damaged due to dirt.

[talkbitcoin]

safe, but the key can be unsafe because the floppy are worse than HDD about the writing errors, if failed to read well then your key is gone.
for the Qt wallet, you will even need at least 30000 of them for the blockchain, the monster of space. 

He just have to store only the private key to encrypted files, so he just have to import/sweep private key later
So, you just need a floppy disks.

Also, i doubt he can found floppy disk reader

if you read the topic you will see that he already has a Floppy drive to read those disks also you find out that somebody also gave some amazon links where you can buy it!!

anyways this topic gave me an idea and i think i will also put my encrypted seed on a floppy disk, of course i will be storing it elsewhere too.

[7788bitcoin]

I think the OP is just feel excited about bring an old device/disk back to work. I would suggest you keep both disk and drive in a dry cabinet to avoid fungus growing on the surface of the magnetic media and the reading heads.

Definitely need a backup like paper wallet??

[arcanaaerobics]

Let me tell you the story of my colleague and the floppy disk disaster he went through.
My colleague was making a doctorate in Biology in 2001, flash disks and pendrives were not that common yet and very expensive for a student like him who was from a poor family. He wa going to make the presentation of his thesis and a professor told him to make more than one copy of it on floppy disks in case one does not work, he made 12 copies on 12 different floppy disks, each from a different brand and all floppies were new and used for the first time. Guess what, the day of the presentation the first floppy he tried did not work, so the second, and third, and forth... he was sweating like a pig when he reached the 11th floppy and it didn't work eaither, and only the 12th copy saved him. So don't do it floppies are probably the least reliable form of saving, thank god they are no longer in use thanks to flash memory.

[tiggytomb]

Haha, you could try it just to see but I wouldn't put too much on them.  One bonus is that if you ever got burgled chances are that the thief would take one look at those disks and just laugh and move along so they could be the safest place lol

[bitcoin-hunter]

Floppy disks are very outdated and they are very unreliable when it comes to storing files. Paper wallets are probably better for storing them, and even USBs are bad but not as bad as floppy disks.

I agree to not use floppy disks because they are why to old to hold something valuable like Bitcoins on a floppy disk. Also, most computers do not even have an input where you can put in your floppy disks they are useless right now. 

[110110101]

The best storage is probably the one that uses different techniques to store the data. Floppys generally wont last too long and if they lose their magnetism then the data is lost. But keeping a copy of your .dat file on a floppy, another on a paper wallet, a usb memory stick, cd etc might allow for recovery down the road. All this is based on having something that can read the data at a later point, eg have a floppy reader<->usb stored with the floppy, a cd reader for the disc etc.

Additionally the data should be stored in different locations too in case of a local disaster like a fire or flood.

[Wapinter]

safe, but the key can be unsafe because the floppy are worse than HDD about the writing errors, if failed to read well then your key is gone.
for the Qt wallet, you will even need at least 30000 of them for the blockchain, the monster of space.  

He just have to store only the private key to encrypted files, so he just have to import/sweep private key later
So, you just need a floppy disks.

Also, i doubt he can found floppy disk reader

Yes he has to preserve floppy disk reader also with floppy for future which is going to be an uphill task.At what if after say 15 years he found his floppy disk reader not working properly,where would he find anyone to fix it

[jdmorgan]

Still exist floppy disks?  anyhow even if you find it now, in a maximum of ten years will be hard to find it.

I never would save my coin in a magnetic storage.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk

[shinratensei_]

it's rally dangerous,floppy disk can be easily broken,just drop it from 2 meters height and it'll sure make you lost all of your money, why did storing on floppy disk instead of usb drive which have more benefits than this old thing?

[Enotche]

Well, because the floppy disk is already outdated technology. However, still there is truth in your words. No one can read the floppy disk for the lack of drive.
I would suggest that private keys are printed on a piece of paper, a piece of paper to put in one of the books of the private library.