Manuel Mejia Jr
- 2002.02.04
With the advent of the newest iMacs equipped with CD-RW devices
("CD Burners"), the large complaint Apple faced has been put to
rest. Since the release of the first
Bondi iMac, many Mac users have been commenting on the lack of
a built-in floppy drive. Many users had to either get a third party
external floppy drive and plug it in or resort to some ethernet
network solution that tied the iMac to a Mac with a floppy
drive.
Without a floppy or other removable drive or some type of
network solution, early iMac users had to depend on either the
internal drive or some external Internet-based file server to hold
and move their files and applications. Most users just stored their
data on the iMac's hard drive.
While hard drives are convenient for quick file access, they are
not the optimal device to store files for the long term. Computer
users will accumulate letters, memorandums, photographs, drawings,
music files, and other files as time goes by. This information has
to be archived.
As immortal as the Mac seems to be, components do age and die.
If one of those components happens to be your hard drive, that data
will not be easy or inexpensive to retrieve - it may not even be
retrievable.
In the early days of the Mac, users of computers such as
the Plus did not have the now
ubiquitous hard drive. Many Plus users used floppy drives to store
their information. Those who had some extra money to spend did buy
small 20 MB hard drives [they seemed big at the time! dk]. However,
the user would often have to transfer files to floppy in order to
make room for the applications that they used.
The result of this early disk usage was the development of the
habit of archiving floppy disks. This was a good habit. If the hard
drive broke down, the odds of losing all your data were nil. You
can always go to the backup floppies and load the information onto
a replacement hard drive.
When the iMac was marketed, data backup became a chore that many
Mac users decided not to do. For many, backups were also
impractical because certain files, such as pictures, were simply to
large to fit onto a floppy.
Storage for such large files required file compression or use of
a larger storage device, like a Zip drive (whose disks seem to be
subject to breakdown, according to some users) or CD burners (which
cost a great deal of money at the time). As a result, people are no
longer archiving data, and they risk losing everything to a hard
drive failure, reformat of the hard drive, or malicious deleting to
the Trash.
- [Don't laugh. One of my sons got in a snit and trashed
VirtualPC and the disk image from the family iMac, losing a week's
worth of home schooling for himself and two of this brothers.
Fortunately we still had the disk image from a week earlier on
another Mac, but now we're backing up daily. dk]
Now that CD burner technology has matured and is becoming more
common on computers, it is likely to become the storage device that
will replace the venerable floppy disk. Large files can be stored
with no compression.
Now that data removal and storage has been made easy again, it's
a good to revive the lost art of archiving data.
