In the past few weeks there’s been discussions on one of my author loops about getting data off of those old 5 inch floppy disks. You know, the big ones that look like coasters for a beer stein? Of course, since no one has those ginormous floppy drives any longer, getting the data off takes time and money.
I was feeling pretty smug as I listened to these discussions. All my work is still on my laptop–I just keep transferring it. With one exception. I’d moved Ravyn’s Flight to CD. This format discussion had me reloading all the files for my first book back on my computer.
And my smugness returned.
Until I started thinking about this new series idea and remembering a fragment of an idea I’d come up with years earlier. Of course, I couldn’t remember enough of it for the thing to be useful, but I could just look at the file
Um, yeah. You see, all these idea fragments were saved *only* to one of the small floppy disks. (I console myself with the fact that I never used big floppy disks.) Problem is my laptop with the small floppy drive died. My old desktop can still be fired up…if I have half an hour to kill while it boots.
That sound you heard? That was my smugness balloon being popped.
I ordered an external floppy drive that plugs in via USB, and when it arrives, I will be transferring everything off the small floppy disks onto my hard drive. Then it will be backed up by Carbonite (an automatic, off-site backup service) and all will be good.
I’ll also be slower to scoff at authors who don’t have all their data in a readable format. If this discussion hadn’t come up, in a few more years, it probably would be difficult to even find an external floppy drive and I’d be in the same position they’re in now. Technology moves fast, but word processing files are small and hard drives are large. From now on, everything goes on the hard drive and moves from system to system with me.
Tags: computers
I had a professor once who said the 20th century was/is the most documented century ever — with the expectation that in the future scholars will have no trouble finding out what we were doing.
I told her I thought that was false. Digitization does not = permanent. The storage media is far more ephemeral than we think.
Should I even mention the whole file FORMAT thing??? What if you prefer Wordperfect? Can you even buy the software anymore?
Carolyn,
I agree with you. I think the information stored digitally is in a much more precarious state than what's on paper. I also think we might have an issue with the quality of paper/ink and how long that will hold up as compared to past centuries. I can envision a day where archeologists stare at the remains of our computers and can't figure out what they were or what they did.
Patti
Casbahj,
Yes, format is an issue, too. Microsoft Office 2003 is not backward compatible with itself, as I discovered when I tried to access an old file at the Evil Day Job. And Office 2007 changed its file extensions from doc to docx. Thanks a lot, Microsoft.
And yes, WordPerfect is still being sold. It's what I write with because it's so much more user friendly than Word (which I use every day at the Evil Day Job).
Patti