I’m writing this while formatting floppies. No, this isn’t something I wrote in the 80s and reposted. It’s January and time to put a bunch of stuff which has been accumulating in my office up for sale. Most will probably end up on eBay. The stuff I don’t want to ship will either go straight to recycling or I will have to finally take a look at Craig’s List. I imagine some of the really old stuff, like that PCMCIA SCSI II adapter, will end up leaving the country to find someone with a notebook old enough to still have such an adapter slot. Sad really.
Anyway, this got me pondering. The one problem thumb drives haven’t been able to solve is labelling. From the earliest days of floppies we had glue/stick on labels one could write on (with felt tip pen if they were already on the floppy.) I have seen businesses purchase special containers for their removable/swappable backup drives so they could not only ship and store safely, but put labels on them.
I realize most people _still_ don’t backup their computers. At best, some desktop users have one (1) USB they leave connected so automatic backup runs. A sad and misguided few are “storing it in the cloud.” Seriously? In a post Sony, post insert-company-name-here hack world, you are going to put all of your financial information, that sex video you made and can’t quite bring yourself to delete, and other embarrassing if not directly ruinous stuff up on a run-for-profit cut-costs-every-day site with management that never figured out cheap = hackable?
Cheap also equal disrespected. I say that because I’m using my IBM brand USB floppy drive to format these floppies instead of my LS-120. I still use my LS-120 to backup my book writing. They still more than sufficient capacity wise, allow me to put labels on them, and off-site storage is easily achieved by taking a few in the house. I don’t have to keep them in some strictly controlled order because I can look at a date on the label and know which is the oldest and thus next to be re-used.
Yes, I have an external RAID drive I use for “automated” backup of some directories. I have multiple external single drives which I periodically perform bare metal backups in some rotated manner. I still use my Super Floppy for the important stuff.
It just saddens me to see so many people owning computers and never backing them up. There is really no excuse. I just looked. There are people selling 128GB flash/thumb drives on eBay for under $20. You can get multiples, perhaps color code them, and store your backups in different locations. The one thing you can’t do though is put a label on it so you can tell what it is and from when without mounting and potentially damaging it.
