Floppy disks have been in use for decades and have served us well. They can hold 1.44 megabytes of information and are more or less infinitely re-writeable. (Till they inexplicably de-format themselves just when you need them most).
New computers today are usually sold without floppy drives. This can be annoying if you have been saving data on floppies. Why should you give it all up? Well, maybe you shouldn’t. It is nice to have that option. But these days you have many other ways to portate data. (I like the sound of that; “portate data“. I wonder if that phrase is copyrightable).
So, what are your options?
1. CDs. Cds hold 700 or more megabytes of stuff. If you buy them on sale in bulk you can pay less than 20 cents apiece. Of course you will want to have paper or plastic sleeves so that adds to the cost. Let’s say a total of 50 cents maximum. Cheaper than toothpaste at a dollar store.
2. DVDs. This is not really a useful portating option unless you want to load up gigantic amounts of data to take from home to the office or to home from the office. Then it certainly is worthwhile, but you should see a therapist if you are doing that.
3. Digital Card Drives. You can buy a small digital card drive (The kind cameras use) for a few dollars. It can hold at least 8 megabytes of data and is easy to lose in your pocket. Nifty for small needs and can even be sent by surface mail (I refuse to say “snail mail”) if you are too dumb (scratch ‘dumb’, replace with ‘techno-ignorant’ or ‘digitally-phobic‘) to email the data. You may also need to carry a card reader with you though most recent computers have them built in.
4. USB Flash Drive. The cost of these little key chain drives is so low now you can afford to give them out like peanuts. Well, maybe not peanuts, but, well, let’s say a dozen roses, the cheap kind at the supermarket. A USB Flash Drive is utterly rewritable and real handy. Just about every computer in the modern world has at least two USB ports so the drive is almost universally usable. This may be the single best replacement for the floppy.
5. Mini-hard drive. About the size of a small matchbox, this device can hold multi-gigabytes of data. Costs less than $200 and can store half your world in the palm of your hand. A far cry from a floppy but our needs do change in this fast growing world.
6. Storage on the web. You can easily find places to store your data on the web. If nothing else you can email yourself the data and have it sitting there when you want to retrieve it. You can even send it to several places in case of apocalyptic disaster on one or more of them.
So, you can still use floppies; who is to stop you, but you have lots of other choices which probably will serve you better. If you are looking for a pile of used ones, I can get ‘em for you wholesale. Formatability not guaranteed.
Happy transporting. (Make that ‘portating’)
Jack Wilson is a writer and artist from Los Angeles and Phoenix.
http://www.geocities.com/galimatio/jackwilson.html
