Death of the floppy spells time to back up

When was the last time you bought a floppy disc? If you can remember that far back, then that occasion probably was the last time you ever will. For the last nail in the floppy coffin has been hammered home.

Retailer, PC World has announced they are discontinuing sales of floppies when the current stock runs out, a move that is expected to be followed widely by those who haven't already dropped floppies from their stock lines.

This death knell for the floppy has been a relatively slow process, the biggest surprise being just how long it has taken to kill them off rather than their inevitable demise. While this is a natural technological evolution in the same way that we can no longer buy Betamax video recorders, car stereos that only play cassette tapes and clothes with labels not made out of sandpaper, there are implications. For how many of us, despite the CDs and USB flash drives, still have floppies kicking around in our desk drawers?

Time now, it would appear, to get the information contained on these floppies onto another form of removable media before computers with floppy disc drives disappear too. Today you would be hard pressed to buy a new computer that has a floppy disc drive fitted as standard. Indeed, thats been the case for at least the last four years.

Tempting as it is to merely consign floppies to the bin on the grounds of the data being elderly, you can be guaranteed that anything deleted will be required two weeks after it has been iced. And thats not taking into account any Data Protection implications that arise.

Knowledge is power, and if it has been a while since you looked at your floppies, goodness knows what business nuggets might be there waiting for you now with the passage of time. After all, its easy to forget exactly what useful information you possess or how its relevance has changed without checking now and then.

Think of it as data mining your desk drawer only in miniature. For anything you do find isnt going to be huge. Not in physical file size anyway, when the capacity of a floppy is 1.44MB, which, by todays standards, is laughable.

If, like me, you have managed to hoard dozens of floppies on the grounds of them coming in handy some day, you face a longish session of feeding the floppy disk drive and copying to the hard drive. Rather than get bogged down in investigating what has been squirreled away all these years, concentrate on getting the files backed up to your PC and thence to CD or other storage of choice.

A further challenge after backing up these files might then be to actually open them. Newer versions of software packages arent always completely backwards compatible and often will mangle the formatting if it is able to open the old document type at all.

But floppies that have kicked around loose in a drawer are likely to prompt an error message saying the disc is unreadable. By now, weve forgotten that the trick is to eject the disc and tap the edge on the desktop a couple of times. Usually this is enough for it to become magically readable again.

Once, after having tried everything to get a floppy to read, I ejected it for the umpteenth time and set about venting my wrath and spleen - by giving it a good old twist diagonally, corner to corner, and tossing it in the bin. A while later I relented, decided to give it one more try and hey presto! I had a readable floppy. Do not try this at home, or in the office, its not recommended.

*  Floppies have been superseded by much larger capacity removable storage media such as USB Flash drives and keys, rewritable CDs, memory cards and DVDs.
Globally, sales of floppy discs have been falling since the 1990s. Last year an estimated 700 million were sold, a far cry from the two billion sales volume of 1998.
The first floppy disc was introduced in 1971 by IBM. A decade was to pass before Sony introduced the 3.5 inch floppy disc which became the standard storage unit of the 1980s and 1990s.