Maybe it's time to transfer that stuff off your old floppies.
We saw
this article from PC World talking about how USB floppy drives are still being made. It grabbed our attention for two reasons.
- The author seems flabbergasted that everyone hasn't switched to pen drives by now. Granted he may have been adding a little journalistic flourish to the story (as we also may have done on occasion), but except for new laptops I don't think I've seen a machine that doesn't take ye old 3.5 inch floppy. Plus, affordable USB pen drives have been on the market maybe two years. Hardly time enough to replace floppy disk use.
- You, dear reader, may have a lot of floppies laying around and now is a good time to transfer them to another storage medium.
Why is now a good time? Because your thinking about it and you still have a machine that can read the disk. It won't be long before you turn around and you'll be searching for a machine to slip that floppy into. And it will probably even sooner that you'll be searching for a program that can read the out-dated format that your files were written in. So here at Zolved, we recommend you pull out all the old disks, copy them to a folder on your computer (don't delete or format the disc), then back up that folder. Back it up several ways, like to two different CDs and to an external hard drive, and maybe to a web-based storage site. If you held on to these documents for this long, you'll want to be sure to have access to them in the future. If you've switched to a laptop (or already have a floppy-less desktop),
USB floppy drives are very inexpensive.
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