Water damage to floppy disks

Some floppy 3 1/2 inch diskettes were flooded over Christmas, and
left/not noticed till now. They apparently cannot be read any more.
What can we do and what could have been done if noticed earlier? Or
is it just an awful lesson in the importance of the off-site backup?

    **** Moderator's comments: If the disks contain important
    data, don't give up just because you can't read them on your
    machines. Disk recovery specialists have been known to recover
    data from some real basket cases, but be prepared to pay (i.e.
    it probably isn't going to be worth the cost unless the data is
    genuinely critical). We usually think of this sort of thing in
    connection with hard disks but I've read some interesting
    accounts of some quite astonishing restorations (admittedly,
    most of these were quite some time ago, when storage density was
    lower than it is now.

Mark Clarke
+44 171 277 1633

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                  Conservation DistList Instance 9:55
                Distributed: Wednesday, January 17, 1996
                        Message Id: cdl-9-55-009
                                  ***