How much time do you spend with actual floppies?

[Karlos]

@Bruce Abbot

Yep - never trust a PC hard drive (can't count the number that have died on me).

To be fair, I think it was the controller board that died because it was in good health (at least according to SMART). It was a Linux/Windows dual boot, all the important stuff was on ext4 partitions. I priced up professional recovery but there were other priorities and, well, time passes. It's probably still recoverable. It was the push I needed to start thinking "sod it, just use the cloud". I still have local backups that just sync from GitHub, but I think their infrastructure is probably more resilient than mine

[Thorham]

Haven't used floppies for a long time (15+ years). My A1200 doesn't even have a floppy drive.

[ImmortalA1000]

Before I got the SD2IEC I used floppy disks for hours a day as my machine of choice was an SX-64. Once I had run out games to play though from my stash of crack disks I haven't gone back to them on the C64. I do use C64 tapes though (loading screens+music).

On my Amiga I have to use floppy disks as I haven't sorted out a Gotek in an external drive case but as I have 1000s of floppy disks to use as blanks and you can't boot from an external drive on my Amiga 1000 once I have used X-copy to write out some new ADFs to play I will again be using floppies all the time.

[kremiso]

around a month each year, during late spring/early summer season;

it's an old but big house, where i have my retroarsenal, included an A500, an A1200, and a trunk full of disks, originals and not

real retrogaming full immersion period

[kriz]

Use them still, its quite nice to just boot the floppy and go straight into the demo/intro you want to see. Like a console experience..

Actually using it more the last years since a lot of demos now are less demanding (one floppy vs 10 megs of data)

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by Thorham

Haven't used floppies for a long time (15+ years). My A1200 doesn't even have a floppy drive.

I'm in the exact same case.

[xc8]

Originally Posted by kriz

Use them still, its quite nice to just boot the floppy and go straight into the demo/intro you want to see. Like a console experience..

Exactly the same !
Using floppies is fun, for multi-floppy games -> WHDLoad of course.

[kriz]

Indeed, same I do @xc8!

[d4rk3lf]

I was never annoyed with floppies like some people (well, after Commodore 64, and tape loading, turbo 250, then game, and no guaranties that it will be successful), Amiga was heaven.

I still think it was not THAT bad, and I also had at some point Sega Genesis (before Amiga)
Games with 2-3 floppies (vast majority) was very ok-ish... sure some sdventures and such was pain...

I was only annoyed with Wing Commander on my A1200, because they haven't made option to skip animation, so when you die, instead of just restarting level, you had to load all the animations of dying, then load mission back...

[klx300r]

Every time when I boot up my Amiga 1000 since my hard drive went bad few years ago and now use my Parceiro (first version) which requires a kick disk in at boot up for the hard drive (now SD) card to load.

Still have tons of my old 3.5’s that still work great the secret is keeping them stored with anti-humidity sackets in closed disk holders. I still use them to regularly transfer stuff from my X1000 and 4000 to my Amiga 1000 as I find much easier and second nature that way instead of taking our the SD card, putting it into the USB adapter, inserting into my X1000, coping file to SD card, removing USB adapter, inserting SD card into Parceiro lol

Mounting ADF files nowadays is cool and convenient but I like using my floppies still

[Nightshft]

I also still use floppies on my three Amigas (A500,A600,A1200).

I would buy a Gotek if really needed, but for now it works surprisingly well.

A lot of my old Floppies have gone bad when the storage room in the old house I was before had a bit high humidity, so be warned about that. But a year ago somebody a 30 minutes drive away sold some packs of empty floppies in good condition and they work just fine.

Like kriz said, it's a nice experience.
At least if you don't have to swap them around but for programs/games/demos with multiple MB there's luckily a CF-HDD meanwhile.

At a shop sale last year, I even found a NEW disk storage box

[Karlos]

Now that I think about it, the only time I've used floppies since having a NIC in the Amiga is when my BlizzPPC decides to forget it's flash settings and needs a reminder. However I'm also pretty sure that the last few times that happened, I threw caution to the wind entirely and ran the flashtool from a bootable IDE partition. I'm pretty sure I've had a NIC since at least 2007, if not longer.

[Retro1234]

A good few years back some of the guys got me into writing Originals/IPFs back to disk using PowerCopy on my A600 and I probably preferred it but on my A1200 nah.