Floppy disks viable for wallet.dat storage?

[grue]

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

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

You just said they fail randomly!

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

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

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

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

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.

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

[tpantlik]

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• Paper wallets are perfect, but many power users don't have a printer since it is becoming an outdated device.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

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 

[Fallout]

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

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.

[grue]

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

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..

[escrow.ms]

Why complicate? If you have some coins you wanna hoard, move them all to one address, export it's private key and use paper and pen then
store papers on multiple locations. You can use some additional obfuscation methods, like reversing the data, shifting it for 4 chars to right, etc.
Hidding the data in plain sight is by far the best deal possible, like using shopping bills and writting obfuscated private key on them. There is no
way you would realise some of papers around my house are Bitcoin and altcoin private keys, both them and data on them look worthless.

Be creative, and try not to depend on high-tech "solutions".

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.

[peonminer]

Why complicate? If you have some coins you wanna hoard, move them all to one address, export it's private key and use paper and pen then
store papers on multiple locations. You can use some additional obfuscation methods, like reversing the data, shifting it for 4 chars to right, etc.
Hidding the data in plain sight is by far the best deal possible, like using shopping bills and writting obfuscated private key on them. There is no
way you would realise some of papers around my house are Bitcoin and altcoin private keys, both them and data on them look worthless.

Be creative, and try not to depend on high-tech "solutions".

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.

Those two are high-tech "solutions" so better avoid else you will be dependant on 3rd party services or need to mess with storing images.

Get it engraved on some stuff.

Yes, but do not use gold bars for the purpose! 

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

Seems legit.

[grau]

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.

[Cyberdyne]

Why complicate? If you have some coins you wanna hoard, move them all to one address, export it's private key and use paper and pen then
store papers on multiple locations. You can use some additional obfuscation methods, like reversing the data, shifting it for 4 chars to right, etc.
Hidding the data in plain sight is by far the best deal possible, like using shopping bills and writting obfuscated private key on them. There is no
way you would realise some of papers around my house are Bitcoin and altcoin private keys, both them and data on them look worthless.

Be creative, and try not to depend on high-tech "solutions".

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)

[Dabs]

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.

[grue]

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).

[Dabs]

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.