A while back I posted that I had just completed the remodel of my home office/writing room. There is a lot of inspirational things in the room. Unfortunately, my computer is nearly ten years old. So old in fact that it has a 3.5″ floppy drive.
Some of you will remember these data storage devices before cloud-based online back-up, thumb-drives, dvds and cds. When the 1.44 Mb High-density/Double-sided floppies first came out I thought, “Wow, I can store my entire hard drive on less than twenty of these!” They can fit into a box roughly the size of two packs of cigarettes. My old 5 1/4″ floppies were finally obsolete.
Time passes…back to the present.
With the new room completed, the domestic CEO stated, “It is time we get rid of that piece of sh*^t desktop and get a new laptop.”
“Excuse me? Did you say we should purchase a new computer?”
“Yes, I …”
The car was started before she finished.
Two hours later, I look like a little boy petting his new puppy. It is so shiny and new and fast and new and cool and did I say new?
So I started the process of converting data from the old desktop to the NEW laptop. I took my time and cleaned as I went. Then, something dawned on me. I have a paper box filled with 3.5″ floppies filled with data I don’t want to lose. However the laptop does not have a floppy drive. So, yesterday, I transferred files to the laptop and scrubbed 263, 3.5″ floppies. 1.44Mb X 263 floppies equates to 378.72 Mb of data. That’s just over a third of a Gb. In today’s world of memory, it’s nothing. The smallest thumb drive I now own holds 1 Gb. But, those floppies represent 25 years of my data.
I ultimately dumped a lot of old data, old file types and outdated software. However, the really good news, is that I found some old writing files that I had forgotten about. Over the next few days/weeks, I’ll reorganize the files and try to post a few of them.
Now I have no excuse. Well, other than I type slowly.
How about you? Do you have old storage files that need clean-up? You might be surprised what you will find.
Tales From The Hare 