I keep loosing information from the diskettes.

How old is your floppy drive ? If it is more than 4,5 years it may be dirt that is corrupting your disks. A floppy drive has little to no protection against dirt and dust.

Could also be your disks .... are they new diskettes ? If they too are quite old then it could be the problem. Floppy disks were known to lose data easily. Even the smallest magnetic field, like a tv set, can wipe the data off of those disks.

If you provide more info it would be easier to pinpoint the problem.

The age is likely a large part of your problem then.

Why not use more modern methods of portable data storage, like a CD-R, or a USB flash drive?

The most common cause I've seen for losing data on a floppy is dust. Most such drives are in a case with more air exhausted by fans that supplied. So the case sucks in air through the available openings, and an easy one is the front slot of a floppy drive. This ends up depositing dust inside the drive, often accumulating on the heads. When you insert a disk and it turns, sometimes the dust balls scrape a groove in the disk surface and there goes a track!

Because my use of the floppy was infrequent, I got into the habit of using a floppy drive cleaner (alcohol solvent) before putting in the disk. Then I'd stick a thin thing into the front slot to keep the spring-loaded slot cover open and hasten the air flow to dry out the alcohol in a few minutes, and THEN use the disk.

Only problem this gave me is, where do you find a cleaner kit? These drives have become so unpopular that few parts shops carry the cleaners. The last one I bought, after phoning about ten shops, was their last one, and I got the feeling they were glad to be rid of that old inventory!