The Backup Blues
Farewell to Floppies
Losing
data is not a rainy day—its out and out stormy weather. Today I want
to look at mass storage devices. Saving your data to floppy disks is
a good start. At least you have a copy of the important stuff
....somewhere.
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
here a click as the metal door on the bottom slides open and the
disk spins up. The floppy has been a standard method for making a
copy of your data for over 30 years.
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. If you park your floppy in the
same pocket as the auto-lock for your car you might as well kiss
your data “goodbye.” Floppies hate magnets!
