There seems to be a lot of hype about floppies. Magnetic fields reduce remarkably quickly with distance. As a result of this thread I did a little experiment (which you can all try). I filled a floppy with files and placed it on top of one of my speakers for 24 hours. It has an ordinary 5" driver (not a special computer type) in a small box and the floppy was about 2" from the magnet. I then did a file compare and there were no errors which is what I would expect.

I've always used generic floppies and only rarely had a dud. Most of the problems stem from mishandling and bad drives. I've never had the metal cover part from the disk and I've been using floppies since their inception for all my backups (that must be close to 20 years now). Floppies are made by a few manufacturers and often the only difference is the label. CD-Rs are the same. I have a program which detects the manufacturer of a CD-R and all the ones I have (Imation, Memorex etc.) are all made by the same company).

I will agree with Gary, though. Don't place floppies too close to large transformers. There is quite a considerable field due to leakage in the core airgap.

Bryan