Rant: My uncle swore by floppy disks for backups and I found out why after 15 years

Back in 2008, my uncle gave me a box of floppy disks and said to keep them for 'real backups.' I thought he was crazy. Fast forward to last month, I was trying to recover some old family photos from a crashed hard drive. Nothing worked until I dug out that box. One of those floppy disks had a copy of the only photo of my grandma from 1987. So yeah, he was onto something with physical media. Has anyone else found old data on forgotten formats like Zip disks or MiniDiscs?

2 comments

2 Comments

irisross19d ago

Wait, so you're telling me that old box of floppy disks my uncle shoved in my closet might actually have saved me from losing my dog's baby pictures too? I'm joking, but honestly this is exactly the kind of thing that makes me wonder if I should just go back to saving everything on a stack of CDs like it's 2003. I mean sure, floppy disks are basically medieval technology at this point, but at least they don't randomly corrupt themselves the way modern storage does. Maybe the real lesson here is that 'outdated' doesn't always mean 'useless', it just means it takes 10 minutes to copy a single photo.

troykim23d ago

That bit about the floppy disk having the only photo of your grandma from 87 really hit me. I used to think physical media was totally outdated too, but after losing a whole folder of videos from a dead flash drive last year I get it now. Sometimes the old stuff is just more reliable in the long run, even if it's slow and clunky.