Are floppy disks safe to store wallets?

[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.

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.

you can always encrypt the key before engraving it.
also engraving on a metal doesn't necessarily need high tech equipment like laser or expensive machines. you only need a hammer and chisel
http://www.wikihow.com/Engrave


also there are tools that have letters on their head (like the picture below) which you use a hammer to indent the metal with that letter.

[the_poet]

Never trust floppy disks, they can seem to work flawlessly but become suddenly unreadable when you need something you have stored on them. I learned the lesson the hard way back in the day.

[wintermeasures]

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

I think it's very safe compared to online wallet prone hack. But it is not safe if the diskect is damaged cartilage and because the technology is old,I feared no floppy disk in the future to open your discket.
hehe just my opinion

[Redrose]

You were just lucky. They day you'll need it, they will be gone forever. If there aren't used anymore today, that's for a good reason.

[smcity]

Floppy disks are very old and you are lucky still to have them

[Boosterious]

Floppy disks are very old and you are lucky still to have them

yes its old device,i can't find my old flopy disk on my house,i forgot where i put it,and i think its not good idea to store wallets on floppy disk,its too old and you will hard to find old computer to open your floppy disk everywhere.

[bitcoineverything]

I always had a hard time using floppy disks before. My files always got corrupted or my floppy disks got viruses. I would definitely not recommend it and it is not anymore useful in the present times.

[bitcoineverything]

.....

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.

you can always encrypt the key before engraving it.
also engraving on a metal doesn't necessarily need high tech equipment like laser or expensive machines. you only need a hammer and chisel
http://www.wikihow.com/Engrave


also there are tools that have letters on their head (like the picture below) which you use a hammer to indent the metal with that letter.

Wow! Awesome and great ideas here. I have never thought of the engraving thing but I can go with the laminator and maybe frame it.

[27QVUTZj8rgZP1]

Are floppy disks safe to store wallets?

No.

There are way better alternatives nowadays. I'd consider CD, DVD, M-Disc, Cloud storage. Just make sure your wallet is encrypted with a strong password and with quantum proof encryption.

And always name your wallet files randomly, naming as "My Millionaire Bitcoin Wallet" is definitely not a good idea and will just encourage brute force attacks and attempts. Naming it as "travel_71nYNujPnL" would work otherwise.

Even binary data printed in sheets of paper and buried somewhere in this planet would be safer than a floppy.

[thejaytiesto]

No because floppies are notoriously unreliable. You just got lucky with those particular disks.

Maybe that was the case, but all the IBM and Sony ones are working lol. And I have found an even older floppy (the ones that folded), I would like to try this one out but I don't have a reader for big floppy disks anymore, but im sure someone already made one that can connect to usb

Are floppy disks safe to store wallets?

No.

There are way better alternatives nowadays. I'd consider CD, DVD, M-Disc, Cloud storage. Just make sure your wallet is encrypted with a strong password and with quantum proof encryption.

And always name your wallet files randomly, naming as "My Millionaire Bitcoin Wallet" is definitely not a good idea and will just encourage brute force attacks and attempts. Naming it as "travel_71nYNujPnL" would work otherwise.

Even binary data printed in sheets of paper and buried somewhere in this planet would be safer than a floppy.

Yes, I have backups everywhere and they are all encrypted. What do you consider "quantum proof encryption" to be tho??

[bitbollo]

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

I think that the really problem is find an hardware that could read easily a floppy... they are literally disappeared a lot of young nerds don't know what are and how it was hard use a floppy for every operation....  I think you could save the passphrase wallet... maybe it's more sure as device space...

[27QVUTZj8rgZP1]

...What do you consider "quantum proof encryption" to be tho??

Any well known and established symmetric algorithm (e.g. AES-256) is safe, considering key size of at least 256 bits.

As far as I know.

[phreaky]

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

I think that the really problem is find an hardware that could read easily a floppy... they are literally disappeared a lot of young nerds don't know what are and how it was hard use a floppy for every operation....  I think you could save the passphrase wallet... maybe it's more sure as device space...

Indeed these kiddo's from now do not even know the name, they are thinking you are talking bullshit, they never heard from it.
I honestly think it can be safe.

[MarcoPon]

As anecdotal evidence goes...

Just couple months ago I found myself experimenting with old floppies from 20 to 30 years ago.
A bunch of 880KB Amiga single density ones, and both 1.44MB PC high density and 720KB turned 1.44MB via hole punching. Some of well known brands, some with no branding at all.
I had no problems reading a complete image out of each floppy I tried, with an Hitachi USB floppy drive from 10 years ago. I was kinda suprised.

Again, I don't recommend actually using floppy nowadays to store things (it's also most impractical), but they worked far better than I expected.

Old, cheap burned CD-Rs, on the other hands... a real bloodbath!

[jacobmayes94]

Maybe tattoo your private key to yourself

[Monnt]

Maybe. But think about the compatibility. Floppy disk readers are already incompatible with Windows, and you need a 3rd party program to read it. In a few years, those applications will not be updated.

[bitbollo]

the data are registered in a magnetic tape? I am asking this because I remember something like this...
also floppy are so "delicate" if you have a little damage on your plastic case you lost all information ... and find a way to fix it is quite impossible...

[ripplehd]

instead of a floppy disk save it on to a usb pen drive floppy disks are going way too back in the 90's and it won't be a good way to save data because they can get corrupted and damaged easily. To me it just looks like flat fragile plastic which wasn't engineered tough enough like a hard disk drive.

[Evildrum]

I saw floppy disks and was thinking back to how they used to get damaged from to much sunlight and had to be kept in their envelops. Damn that was a long time ago,crazy how times have changed.
Have seen a lot of discussion and no real solid way to really protect yourself long term,seems like there is a business idea some where here to be hatched for protecting data in general.

[mcduff]

Forget floppies they degrade over time (even CDs do).

I had a box of 100 floppies stored in a cool, dark place and 10 years later many were totally unreadable.