A somewhat unrelated note on floppies and flash drives. I say this due to recent and ongoing flabbergasting experiences at work.

If you have important documents, you should have them backed up somewhere. This does *not* mean keep your only copy on a floppy, CD-RW or flash drive. If you need a working copy on portable media, fine, but *frequently* copy it to a backup location. If your office, say, has a server that the local admin backs up daily to tape, freakin use it! If you have a USB hard drive for backup, that would be a good place.

Floppies: I can’t believe people still use these for important documents, but I swear somebody asked me for help with a floppy drive last week. And in the past 5 years I’ve had 4 instances of people coming to me in a panic that their only copy of a critical document is on this floppy and quit working. (They had been updating the file on the floppy for years.) Floppies *will* physically wear out, especially if you’re updating an Excel or Word file and re-saving it frequently.

CD-RWs: Sometimes these just quit working. I won’t explain how or why, just understand that there are slight incompatibilities with these things, and one day they’ll quit working in one of your PCs. They may or may not continue to work in other PCs. Be aware of this if you keep a working copy on CD-RW, make frequent backups and be prepared to start another CD-RW or reformat the existing one and restore from backup…it will be necessary sooner or later.

Flash: I haven’t had a problem with these yet, but I’m sure I eventually will. I don’t think most people realize that flash drives can physically wear out…theoretically after a few hundred thousand writes. Modern flash devices have tricks to balance writes and wear and tear across their memory range rather than “burning a groove” in one spot. The point is they’re not infallible. If you have a working copy on flash, keep it backed up elsewhere. As I say, I haven’t had a problem yet, but I see a bunch of users carrying around flash drives, and I have no reason to think they’re treating them differently than the floppies or CD-RWs.