best way to transport floppy disks and zip disks?

[ABEL]

yes i still have old backups on floppy disks and zip disks that i want to keep.
too many to transfer to CD in the alloted time before i move.
so i was just wondering, is it safe to mail floppy disks and zip disks?
or do i need to buy special mailers for them?
these are being mailed overseas.

 

[Liesje]

You'll need to back them up at some point. They use magnets that just become de-magnetized over a period of time. Even if the disk is kept in pristine condition, never used, it's just not going to work after a certain period of time. (Note: apparently flash memory also has a limited number of times it can be read/written to). Also, I suspect being mailed over seas could potentially erase them. I'm not sure how all the scanners work, but where I work we use a magnet to "erase" old floppy disks (normally I would just trash them, but since it's official stuff we have to make sure no one would dig them out of the trash and access the old data). They could make it just fine, but I dunno...if they were mine I wouldn't bother mailing them.