On 21 Apr 2004 at 10:48, Dennis Bathory-Kitsz wrote: > What gave rise to the idea that floppies were unreliable? Is it just > because they tended to be stored badly? Or was it a system-dependent > recording method?
I tend to agree with you about floppies. However, it *is* true that floppy drives that are repeatedly written to on a daily basis tend to go bad fairly quickly. If you're using a daily backup disk and writing to it frequently, it probably won't last more than a few months. And in the old days, a lot of people developed the habit of using a floppy disk for all their Word or WordPerfect documents, and it got used every day literally for years. When these kinds of disks went bad, the results were really disastrous, often entailing the loss of all the data on the disk. And I saw people doing this recently, long after hard drives became the norm for storing all your files. I also used to have clients using Zip disks for backup and I told them to rotate media between A and B disks every other day, and to retire the disks after 3 months. Nobody every did it, and they had disks go bad (and not just ones that had been used often). The point of backups is that you should have *many* of them, and not be completely dependent on any particular single backup. Nonetheless, I've got 15-year-old floppies that are still usable. I'd never use them as sole backup medium, though. But for disposable backups, I think they are fine. -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
