Spring Break
The Tech Factor: Friends don't let friends use floppies
by Jon Melenson
Forum | 3/18/03
Posted online at 6:40 AM EST on 3/18/03
It happens every semester, usually around midterms and finals. Some poor student will walk into the UNet office offering to sell his first-born child if I can just recover his 10-page paper from a floppy disk. He assures me that it's imperative that I restore his data; he's been working on it all night and it's his only copy.
I sigh quietly to myself and dispense the usual admonishments about floppy usage as I insert the disk into the disk drive. I begin running the standard file-recovering utilities while my onlooker silently prays, as if the disk was his son undergoing a dangerous operation. After a few suspenseful minutes, I am able to recover his file, and the day is saved. The student thanks me profusely before taking off.
He got lucky this time, but other students aren't always as fortunate. I've seen people lose entire theses, semesters worth of hard work, all because they chose to rely on the aging floppy disk standard. Sadder still is that these tragedies could have been avoided if they had simply bothered to use some other mode of storage.
The truth is, no one should be using floppies anymore. They've been around so long that they're practically archaic. With their snail-like speed and 1.44-megabyte size limit, it's no wonder they're going the way of the dodo. Apple hasn't included floppy drives with their Macintosh systems since 1998, and just recently PC manufacturer Dell decided to abandon them as well.
But, more importantly, floppies are incredibly fragile and are known to become damaged and unusable from plain use, a little rough handling or being placed near anything magnetic. Heck, just looking at a floppy funny can cause it to go bad. Fortunately, though, there are a number of established and new technologies ready to replace the floppy disk. In the rest of this column, I'll introduce some of those other mediums and evaluate the pros and cons of each so you will know which ones to use.
E-mail: The best method for backing up important papers is also the easiest. Simply e-mail yourself a copy of your paper as an attachment. Brandeis' mail system is very reliable and allows you to send larger files at one time than other services such as Hotmail.
I sigh quietly to myself and dispense the usual admonishments about floppy usage as I insert the disk into the disk drive. I begin running the standard file-recovering utilities while my onlooker silently prays, as if the disk was his son undergoing a dangerous operation. After a few suspenseful minutes, I am able to recover his file, and the day is saved. The student thanks me profusely before taking off.
He got lucky this time, but other students aren't always as fortunate. I've seen people lose entire theses, semesters worth of hard work, all because they chose to rely on the aging floppy disk standard. Sadder still is that these tragedies could have been avoided if they had simply bothered to use some other mode of storage.
The truth is, no one should be using floppies anymore. They've been around so long that they're practically archaic. With their snail-like speed and 1.44-megabyte size limit, it's no wonder they're going the way of the dodo. Apple hasn't included floppy drives with their Macintosh systems since 1998, and just recently PC manufacturer Dell decided to abandon them as well.
But, more importantly, floppies are incredibly fragile and are known to become damaged and unusable from plain use, a little rough handling or being placed near anything magnetic. Heck, just looking at a floppy funny can cause it to go bad. Fortunately, though, there are a number of established and new technologies ready to replace the floppy disk. In the rest of this column, I'll introduce some of those other mediums and evaluate the pros and cons of each so you will know which ones to use.
E-mail: The best method for backing up important papers is also the easiest. Simply e-mail yourself a copy of your paper as an attachment. Brandeis' mail system is very reliable and allows you to send larger files at one time than other services such as Hotmail.
