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Are You Flipping Without A Floppy?

If you once owned an 8-track cassette player, you certainly remember floppy disks. Even today's teenage remembers the floppy disk.

Not too long ago, every standalone computer came with a floppy disk drive built right in to the tower. A computer's primary drive is the C Drive. The floppy disk drive was called the A Drive.

If you want to have the convenience of having a built-in floppy disk drive in your computer's tower, you can purchase it from certain vendors and either have them install it or do it yourself. If not, it is wise to contact a local computer repair service to handle the installation.

For years, computer users bought boxes of floppy disks. They were easy to label, use and store. All one needed to do was stick the little 3.5 inch disk into the computer's A drive to either access or save files. They came in black as well as many other bright colors, and were handy for organizing data archives.

Perhaps the most technical consideration was whether the media came formatted or not. If not, the floppy disk needed to be formatted manually, which was very easy to do using the computer's built in feature.

For a while, computer towers came shipped with both the CD-ROM and the floppy disk drive. Users had the best of both worlds until computer manufacturers did the unthinkable - eliminated the floppy disk drive altogether. Only the CD-ROM drive remained.

Instead of inserting the floppy into the slot and saving your files to your A drive, it became necessary had to burn the data onto a Writable CD, otherwise known as a CD-RW. Unlike floppy disks, the CD-RWs needed special software that were either built into your computer or mandatory to purchase. What a pain!

This was a data storage and retrieval nightmare for all concerned. The only way to access the data stored on the floppies was to purchase an external A drive that use floppy disks in order to save and retrieve your data. Or, as mentioned, you can install the internal floppy drive yourself.

Depending on whether your data is on your computer or on your external A drive, you can save the date directly to the CD-RW. The advantage in using a CR-ROM drive is that the CDs are still portable as the floppy disk were, and are if you are still using them.

The great advantage in using CD-RWs is that an immense volume of data can be stored. If the floppy disk can be compared to a closet, the CD-RW can be compared to a warehouse.

But what if this happens again? What if they do away with CD-RWs? What are the alternatives to saving large volumes of data?

One alternative is to backup your data to an online server that would completely eliminate the use of internal and external disks. You can sign up with any one of the many online data backup services for a nominal fee. The advantages in using an offsite data storage site is you do not need to worry about your own equipment failing, getting damaged or stolen.

The downside in using an online data backup service is the risk of losing your data of the service has a major system failure or if they go out of business.

It is for these reasons that you should always keep your own data backup on whatever media you choose just in the event disaster strikes. Never put all your data in just one place.

Last, but not least, you can use a portable USB drive that some call a stick drive, thumb drive or flash drive. It is literally the size of a thumb, which lends its name. It holds extensive data and is both portable and affordable. Some people even keep it on their keychain.

With all the alternatives available today, there is no reason not to backup your data.

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