Fortunately, I have a large attic and no intention of moving house.
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Anyone who tried copying a floppy disk on the original 1984 Macintosh must have hated them so much. IIRC it required swapping disks something like 20 times.
Those of us who had Amiga’s just hated their flakiness, their incredible lack of speed and the endless gronk! gronk! gronk! of an empty drive.
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My top left desk drawer. DOS and Linux install disks, Sony Mavicam photos, rubidium standard drivers, spectrometer design files. I no longer have a floppy drive.
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A few years back I borrowed a coworkers KryoFlux to create images of hundreds of old 800KB Mac floppies that I had laying around from my teen years.
Mac floppy drives used a special CLV scheme that could eke 80KB more than DOS formatted disks, which also meant nothing else could read them. Thankfully the KryoFlux is clever enough to extract the contents of the disks from any floppy drive by reading the low level flux transitions on the media.
Most of them read fine, but quite a few still had bit rot problems typical of imperfect storage and handling over the decades. At least I could relive a small part of my formative years by reading all those dumped disk images in vMac on modern hardware.
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Just standard-issue humorless corporate retention policy; or did paper tape based key fill devices like the KOI-18 hang on longer than I would have expected?
I keep one floppy drive around in reserve. Not because I have any floppies; but because I cannot shake the superstitious(though validated often enough to tickle confirmation bias) fear that getting rid of your last reserves of a given media reader/obscure cable/weird adapter/etc. will cause the spiteful universe to send something your way that requires whatever you just got rid of.
I see one floppy drive on the shelf as a small price to pay for keeping the need to actually use floppies at bay.
Now, my 3.5in bay PCMCIA interface; that’s kept out of genuine affection…
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The latter. And our KG was hooked up to a 2400 baud modem from the early 70s that I’m guessing was still leased from the phone company. All hooked up to a dedicated line to DTIC. At one point, somebody decided that the shredder that we had was insufficient to the task of shredding the tape, and the authorized shredders were on back-order so we had to go outside with a lighter, somebody from the safety office, and a fire extinguisher to burn it.
If you’re interested in this kind of thing, the technology has improved substantially. Kryoflux was okay, but there were many things it didn’t capture. Its resolution was limited and it couldn’t handle things like quarter tracking and spiral tracking which saw heavy use in Apple II and Commodore protection schemes. Nowadays the state of the art is the Apple Sauce:
https://applesaucefdc.com/what-is-applesauce/
People imagine there’s some “lowest level” magnetic flux domain that can simply be captured and the problem is solved. That’s not true, especially for protected software. The Kryoflux claimed to do a lot, but was actually quite limited. For example, many protection schemes rely on so-called “weak bits” which are flux regions never written by the factory. They read randomly- you get a different value every time you read them. Many protection algorithms check this- read the area twice, and if you get the same value twice, it’s been copied.
Apple Sauce is the only tool that can handle weak bits(among many other things), because it has an algorithmic format in addition to way better flux resolution. So far we haven’t found any floppy it can’t preserve, no matter how baroque the DRM.
I’m unaffiliated, just a fan. 
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And now you have made me remember the Fastcopy(?) Utility that Andy Hertzfeld at Apple had written. It would vastly speed up full disk copies by using the Mac’s screen memory as more buffer space during the copy, so the screen would fill up with static that represented the 1 or 0 state of that particular bit.
It was an extremely cool hack at the time
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For my use case the KF did what I needed and at the time was the only game in town. Glad to see things keep evolving here. Preservation is important.
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Nice. These are in the top drawer of my desk at work. Email from April, 1995 (exported from Pine or Elm, I’d guess. I’d love to read it now.). Two of the others have my dissertation (1999) and I have no idea what’s on the last one. But I cart them around, just in case. I had my dissertation stored on five floppies, in case any of them failed. One went in my safe at home, one in my advisor’s office, one in my campus office, one where my wife worked, and one at a friend’s house. In addition, since I had root privileges on two systems on campus, I had it squirreled away in a few places in the campus network. Because floppies failed regularly back then.
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When my mom’s cousin died and she packed up his apartment, she saved all the tech stuff for me to go through. Nothing too interesting, but I did keep a 3.5" floppy labeled “Napster” for my tchotchke collection
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Oh that was clever!
Copying a disk on the Amiga was nearly as torturous unless you had a second drive - but it did have a lot more memory to use as a buffer. Though early versions of the OS would probably have fallen over before you got to the end.
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I have some blank floppies just in case. I also have a Windows 3.11 installation set, it’s 11 or 12 floppies. There’s also some DOS 6 disks in the closet.
I also remember duplicating disk software from my shareware days. Just sat at the computer feeding it disks.
As far as thumb drives, I buy them by the handful from Microcenter, they’re all the same size and a Ptouch label fits perfectly.
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I remember my Uncle had several copies of his as well lying around his room.
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