With CDs/DVDs quality and environmental conditions are a big factor, they can degrade pretty fast.
I don’t really know about floppies. Also there may be a difference between 3.5" and 5.12" and maybe the drives could be another issue themselves.
Luckily I’ve made images of my floppies a long time ago.
They’re also all still good for me. I never counted on my CD-Rs lasting but they have so far, including the el cheapo abused ones. I’m more worried about my old CDs.
My environmental conditions are nothing special, but of course they weren’t sitting in the sun or whatever. 
Just put them on the window sill for some time if you want an excuse to throw them all away!
Boooo! And they don’t even own anything directly Larry related. Oh well.
Yeah well, it’s far fetched from Activision. They have nothing to do with what Lowe was auctioning. If the engine would have been part of the auction, I would have understood Activision’s view, but it wasn’t. So, what Activision really said was “Look, we can do this because we are a big company and we have lots of lawyers to sue you for anything, just in case. And you are just one man. We have nothing to lose, you have everything to lose”.
I actually neglected to image stuff like Windows 3 and Works 3. My thinking went at least in part that it’s probably easy enough to find, although whether that’s also true for the Dutch versions I’m not sure.
But I did have to create a Windows 98 VM in order to mount this floppy image I created… which I had compressed with DriveSpace 3.
Contents: a single file. >_> (But still! It was a good short story.)
It reminds me a bit of the one (and luckily only) time there was an incorrect withdrawal from my bank account… by the University of Tilburg. I called up my bank about it and they fixed it. Anyway, point being I had nothing to do with that university. I didn’t sign up for anything there, never visited it, nothing. The first time I ever even visited Tilburg was last year, roughly a decade later.
It was a good choice regarding file format compatibility because its compressed format (.imz) is simply a zipped image file.
Sorry, I may have been unclear. I didn’t mean I created images of the floppies in Win 98 which I then compressed. In 2014 I created an image of a floppy from my Win 98 days, because I couldn’t simply copy the files due to the entire filesystem being compressed by some technology promoted by Microsoft in the '90s. 
I then mounted the floppy in a Win 98 VM to copy the file to another floppy image (because the network wasn’t working), from which I could then extract it.
