What It Takes to Preserve Floppy Disks

When I moved out from my parents I took a box with aprox 100 floppies. I was pleasently surprised when only 2 were unreadeable all others were ok. The other box with CDs had a much higher "fault rate". Go figure.

The internally linked article is much better than this https://www.digipres.org/the-floppy-guide/

Mostly everyone over 40, and even some younger ones, still have some old floppy disks with files that may or may not be of value.

Somewhere in my mother's house, there still is (hopefully) a floppy disk from 2006-2007 with my teenage self's diary. I wish it is preserved

I would like to see approaches to recovering data from fragile disks by placing the inner disk on a flat surface and using some kind of imaging technology to measure the magnetic fields - perhaps an electron microscope could do the job at low enough field strengths?

Using this I imagine it might be possible to not only read the disk data, but perhaps even previous versions of data that has been overwritten.

Preserving old original floppy disks may be useful, for several reasons, but I myself got rid of all my floppy disks many years ago when USB sticks became viable; even ages ago already, e. g. using CDs and DVDs getting rid of floppy disks - so actually those USB devices killed my use case for floppy disks, CDs and DVDs. I still like DVDs but having USB sticks is simply more convenient in the long run.

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