I used to be that way. Marriage you make exceptions. Every few years, she makes me go through stuff and trash what I don't "need." Last few times, since I've been so ill, and figure I'll never get back to it, might as well dump it, I've gotten rid of everything but books. Most of them are probably going next time. And my vinyl, if I ever get around to fixing the turntable to record them to MP3s. I would keep the vinyl, but most of the album covers are ruined from flooding 20+ years ago. Only reason, I've kept them this long is I keep thinking, I'll convert them, since some are rare.
I got everything that I could off floppy drives about 15 years ago or may be more, and was really good about backing everything up. Magnetic media was notorious for failures, and non-laser prints faded pretty quickly back in the day. Although I may still have the 100 pages (16K) or so of BASIC code from a teletype (like a type writer, instead of a dot-matrix printer) for the old Star Trek game on a TRS-80 computer.
Nostalgia is setting in. Maybe I should go through the old video tapes, I still have a few VCRs that work. That might get me off this nostalgia.
Oops. Whole reason I replied, was to mention that floppy disk life expectancy is only a few years of use or non-use. CDs and DVDs have about 25+ years of non-use, and many years of use. Audio CDs are great 'cause of redundancy and error correction. I got about 99% of a Iron Maiden CD that was shot full of holes with a shotgun to play fine without any help. Almost the entire thing, but maybe a few skips. CD cleaning solution works great for scratched up ones too. We took a software CD at work one time, and tortured it with sand paper, files, heat (not enough to completely melt / bend it, but left scorch marks). Used that solution on it, and got most of the info off without doing anything else to it, but cleaning it. I swore by that stuff afterwards, and after having some barely scratched up CDs appear not work any more.
EDIT: Through away all non-3.5" floppy disks after hooking up a 5.25" drive and testing out some disks I still had lying around (atleast 500 still). Got like 5% of them to read, and reformatting the non-readable ones rarely cured them. So most of yours are probably toast like you said. If you got some good drives, and knew what you were doing with manually aligning the heads, you could probably read alot more.
EDIT 2: My probablem is not having it backed up so much as finding it. Although the past few years I've been slacking on doing a proper back up on semi-permanent (DVD) media. I just don't generate that much new stuff any more.
Yther Ore.
Edited, Oct 29th 2013 5:54am by Yther