The Backup Blues
Farewell to Floppies
Losing
data is not a rainy day—it's out and out stormy weather. What are
your options for saving your files?
The floppy has been a standard method for
making a copy of your data for over 30 years. A floppy is a very
thin disk that has a metallic surface. The plastic housing protects
the disk from contaminants, such as greasy finger prints. When you
put a floppy into the A:\ drive, you will hear a click as the metal
door on the bottom slides open and the disk spins up.
However, there are limitations to floppies: size and time. Floppies
only hold 1.44 MB of data. Many, many of my graphic files are too
large to store on a floppy.
Floppies are also temporary storage.
They only last a year. Remember a floppy is magnetic media-which
means it is unstable and vulnerable.
Farewell
to Floppies. New computers do NOT include a floppy drive unless you
pay extra.
