The floppy is dead. Or will be by March next year. That’s when Sony will stop making and selling floppy disks. I remember storing images on those things in my early Photoshop days (which was also back when I used an Amiga for broadcast graphics and 3D animation, but that’s another story). I could get 1 image on a disk, if I kept the file size small enough. That was also around the time that a 40MB hard drive was quite exciting and I used a positively cavernous 135MB hard drive to store graphics files on.

Of course, then Apple defied the industry and brought out a couple of computers without floppy drives. While the world gave a unified “GASP”, I started pulling data off those shoeboxes full of floppy drives onto the newfangled CDs. By the time I actually owned a Mac without a floppy drive, I no longer had any data on floppies.

Now Sony announces that they will no longer produce floppies. I admit, I thought they stopped years ago. But undoubtedly, somewhere, someone is still using a floppy or two. (Here is a high profile user who is probably stocking up now: NASA scavenges for parts for Space Shuttle. Keep in mind that while the story is old, those Space Shuttles are still flying.) Most of the rest of us have moved on to more contemporary ways of storing data a long time ago. For one thing, while a floppy isn’t big by itself, consider that the 12 million floppies sold in Japan last year all together only hold a bit less than 17TB (terabytes that is) of data. Or put another way, that is 17 1TB hard drives, or about 2 shoe boxes worth. I don’t even want to think about how many shoe boxes all the floppies would take. I bet even Imelda Marcos in her shoe buying days didn’t have that many boxes.

The moral of the story seems to be that while we want to keep our data safe over the years, we can’t count on any of today’s formats to be around forever, and it might be a good idea to migrate away from a storage medium before the last, lone manufacturer announces that they will stop production. Of course, there is always ebay …

Claes

posted in at the office, computers

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