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Alternatives To The Floppy Disk?
"I'd like to experiment with something with at least 4 to 8MB capacity. I'd also obviously need a "drive" to allow reading / writing to the media. Ideally it'd be something you could mount inside a computer in a 3.5 inch drive bay. Regardless, as far as interfaces go USB is probably the best option. Cost-wise, the "drives" should be out there for $40 or less. (I've noticed Sandisk offers their USB CompactFlash drives for $29.99.) I'd prefer that the cost of the media be the "heavier" end of the solution.
CD-RWs are not an option for a few reasons, the main one being that CD-RW capable drives are still quite expensive. I'd like to avoid anything that includes as many mechanical components as the antique floppy disk / drive combination. We offer our students space on several file servers, but for many, many reasons the use of floppy disks remains commonplace. We are not a tech-heavy institution: the majority of the students could probably be considered "average" for their age group in terms of computer use. I guess in that sense, part of the reason floppy disks have stuck around is that they offer enough space to save a few documents, and do so in a small, easy-to-use package. However, after all these years, it would be nice to think that someone out there is pushing forward with a standardized, low-capacity, high-reliability alternative."
How about handing out rio mp3 pocket players
Maybe a stupid idea, but why not have them make two backups, on different diskettes. It's certainly the cheapest solution, but not the solution you are looking for probably.
Gorkman
I can understand the problem with a lot of old disks being reused, and a lot of old drives being around that are maybe past their planned lifetime, but I'm having trouble on machines that are no more than 3 or 4 years old, some new a year ago. Has this being happening to anyone else, or am I just jinxed? :)
I have lost count of the number of people and number of times I have told friends and relatives that keeping that important document on a floppy alone is a stupid thing, yet they keep doing it and keep loosing things.
Personally, I have an old 1Gb HDD that I canibalised from an OLD PC of mine, but this is surely FAR from the best idea. CD-RW is a good option, if you have the money, but if you don't, what do you do? I'll stick to the old HDD for a little longer (though it's starting to get a little small at times) and wait for my next upgrade to look at something better...but what is best?
addi $v0, $0, 10 syscall
For some reason, minidiscs have not become popular for computer data storage. I don't know why.
They are relatively cheap, contain >100MB of data (I don't know the exact numbers, but IIRC ATRAC compresses 1:4, so it should be ~160MB), and are fairly robust.
Of course, a minidisc drive contains a lot of mechanics, so it's not as simple as a memory stick drive.
I've been using a ZIP-drive for my different laptop(s), and earlier CDrom-less computers, for install and backup issues since the first ones was released around 1995 AFAIR.
Some disks have been on the road with me since then, and I've never lost a single disk to bad sectors or anything yet.
Ofc. my drive is the 100MB Parrallel version, no USB were around at that time, so I can't say if they slacked on the quality later on.
-H
how about iomega zip disks? ... oh wait, you wanted "high reliability"....
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Take the old "Faster, Cheaper, Better" and replace it with "Capacity, Reliability, Price." You still only get to choose 2. Lets look at the options:
Floppy: Low capacity, mediocre reliability, amazing price. Probably why they're still around. If you want to move small documents, pictures, binaries, etc. then floppies are a good choice. The down side of course being the point of this article.. The reliability thing.
Sandisks: Variable capacity, high reliability, high price. The drives are small and based on USB, so theres no real worry about where you can and can't be able to read your paper. However, the USB drives are cheap, but the smallest Sandisk is 8 megs for $40 (MSRP). That's $5/meg, which by any standard is horrendous. Of course, it does suit the portability and reliability.. But students probably won't want to spend $40(disk)+$30(drive) just so they can get term papers back and forth.
Network: Virtually unlimited capacity, variable capacity, variable price. I like the idea of everyone having a little network share that they can always access. It's not too hard to implement, even across platforms. Of course, what do you do when the network is down or you want to take it home to a computer that isn't wired? This makes the option largely moot.. Physical media are a guaranteed thing.
Unfortunately, you won't find many more options past these ones. The 'big floppy' drives (LS-120, Zip) are out of the question (drives cost a pretty penny and are hardly a standard).
Your best bet? Beat some sense into the students. Floppies are your friend but they aren't flawless. Make backups, have spare disks on hand, etc etc. You'll convince a lot more people to do it that way then to spend enough money for a couple hundred floppies.
I second the idea of the Zip drives. We've used them extensively at work - initially because floppies wouldn't hold the large images and Quark jobs we use for publishing - but after a couple of years of heavy use, reliability counts in positively as well. They just don't fail on us (unlike our hard drives - urgh...).
Easy to understand (it's just a big floppy), high capacity, fast. Internal (IDE) or USB connections are what we use, SCSI and Parallel also exist.
Highly recommended.
I'm not sure about your college's lab machines, but at both my previous university, as well as the one I attend now, the public lab machines tend to be very "unclean". Heavy use, high traffic, accessable to everyone and then some, drives tend to accumulate dust, dirt and gunk at a high rate. Add on to that the stuff scrapped onto the heads by unclean, old disks used by the person before you and you get an environment ripe for disk corruption.
That said, I believe that disk quality has gone done, if only due to the economics. With bulk disk prices being so incredibly low, quality control is probably just another drain on the slim profit margin.
The best option is a 8 up to 64 MB PC card or Compact Flash. All intitutions PCs should have a PC card slot so students can bring their own flash memory card. 16 to 32 MB is enough for carrying practices and source code. It is very reliable, fast and readable by most OSes.
sgis ddo ekil t'nod i
Several years ago it wasn't common to have 20-30 individual point-sources of broadcast microwave radiation on a bus - now everyone has a cell-phone.
Add to that the concommitant increase in local radiation broadcast towers for the cell-phones - plus towers & satellites for pagers and TV.
We're being saturated by radiation everywhere we turn - I'm surprised that floppys last as long as they do, and that they don't glow!
Read "Waldo" by Robert Anson Heinlein for an insightful look at where this may end up.
On the other hand, maybe you should buy a better brand of disk, and clean the heads on your drives.
This sig left unintentionally blank.
Personally, I live in a "computing intensive environment" beeing student in an engineering school, meaning that I use computers everyday in various places and need to exchange files all the time and be able to access them all the time.
About two years ago I realized that floppy disks were not useful anymore, so I never use diskettes anymore, I don't even have any of them.
I store files at my home computer or at my account in the school, if I need to transfer from place to place or share with somebody I use either email or FTP. For really big files I use CD-RW.
Another possible solution would be that LS-120 floppys (120 Mb).
By the way, I would like to know if slashdotters use diskettes or do just like me.
Drive space is cheap, and whole drives can be backedup and accessed over the network. If you don't have the budget, see if you can sell the space to buy the drives. With 20GB drives selling for under $100, the per-meg cost is quite low. Double/tripple the cost to pay for maintenance and backups.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
our uni (13,000 ppl) uses zip disks heaps, almost all general purpose machines have a basic 100meg IDE internal drive (not too expensive in a new system, consider adding as option next u/grade) and media is relativly cheap,. plenty of storage space, less likely to die compared to floppies, but possibly just that bit too expensive? just an example from another uni, for ya
Cheaper to educate the users to best practices
specifically, to have backups of important files, and to use the servers.
You wouldn't believe the problems at work when people saved critical documents to their local drives, then blame IT if the drive fails.
I didn't work in IT, I worked with these people. People just don't understand that computers aren't that reliable.
A few posters, add it to the usage manual/intro course. Plus people won't use the cards anyway, my school has zip drives, most people don't use then, since most people don't have zip drives, many don't even know what they are.
Perhaps you would be interested in this& lt;/A> . It's $80, but it works with the floppy drives you already have, and can use 2MB,4MB(3.3volt and 5 volt).8MB,16MB and 32MB Smartmedia cards. You could buy a few of the disks for when students needed them, and sell the flash disks to the students.
Although this isn't very transportable, I find that the system for storage space across our network at school works extremely well.
I work mostly with large images, and to copy them to floppies would be a nightmare, and to use zip disks is simply too slow. With our nice, switched, 100mbit network I can store up to a couple of hundred mb, easily enough for, well, anything really.
So, if transportability isn't a concern, then consider giving everyone accounts on a file server somewhere that can be easilly accessed from anywhere on campus. (or simply encourage the use of it, if you've already got it going)
Unfortunately, unlike the original group of comparies that standarzized on the floppy disks, all of its self proclaimed `successors' simply aren't standards because they're all tightly controlled by a single company. As a result, prices are kept artificially high and none will ever be a standard. Zip [96Mb], Zip [246Mb], Imation Superdisk [aka, LS120, 120Mb] or any of the others will NEVER be standards, not matter how much its manufacturers say they are.
So Zip media remains $A25 for 100Mb, while CDRs remain $A2 for 650Mb. You can read the zip disk on a few machines, you can read the CDR on nearly all drives. Zip disks take an extraoridinary long time to save, while 8x IDE CDRs can be had for around $A300 [$US150ish, since we have a pathetic tech economy and our dollars pretty weak]. Zip drives cost around $320 for a retail USB 250, [I'm not sure how much for 100Mb or OEM, but it will be more than a CDR]. Zips have moving parts. CDRs don't.
Yes a CDR isn't rewritable. But the media and drive costs more than make up for it. You wan't to write another disk? Spend $A2 and break your old one in half.
Oh, and remember, the writing times on an 8 x CDR [around 8 mins] are much less for smaller amounts of data [not a full CD]. Its likely your students will only be writing small amount sof data [10Mb, its nearly instant].
i think minidiscs would make a great alternative to floppys, ive seen some computers for japan that have minidisc data drive but they use these exspensive data minidiscs, i dont see why someone cant make a drive that uses regular old cheap ausio minidiscs
lose != loose
Use a shared network drive. Our campus (BSD server and WinNT clients for the most part) just has a large "X: drive" that links to your /home directory. You save your files to your X: drive just as you would to the hard drive, very simple. Plus you can access your files from my system on the network or your dorm computer. Plus theres the added benefit of being able to ftp into your account and access the files for easy upload/downloading. Its cheap, its fast, and its secure. Using removable media is so...90's!
Okay, so let's look to the future of legacy-free computing. Floppy disks are obsolete, people are moving on to higher density inexpensive media as Zip Disks, or super disks, or CD-RWs (or even CDRs). This is the iMac quesiton. Apple has tried to get rid of the legacy free features (serial ports are on their way out), no more floppy, fast ethernet, etc. These are good moves, but what do you do in the interim.
This question will come up more and more as time goes on. Lets face it, over the wire is the way to go. How often do physical drives fail? Very rarely. The fidelity of modern magnetic media is excellent. Have the students upload their work to something. Make a turning program for windows / mac / linux or a webpage that allows file transfer. It can be done. Make backups of that. No excuses. No sorting through tons of turning floppies.
Make your students go to a web page. Discourage working off of floppies. Floppies are an excellent way of carring viruses (more so than wire tcp transfer). When was the last time a network corrupted data?
Do what apple does. Sum it all up and say "No one ever uses those any more", and then enforce it. Make them obsolete. It will lead to better computing practices, and fewer shocks as to when homework gets turned in.
Another discussion entirely is good data recovery utilities... Something you sound like you could use...
Why are students saving data onto floppies and moving them through your institution in the first place?
Why not use home directories and SSH? There's a number of easy SSH and SCP clients for Windows, Linux, and Unix. Though none of them match the ease of use as the Linux based GFTP, you could provide instructions for the syntax for the CLI versions [its not that hard].
Setup the home dir using the SMB BOX\\home\%username% syntax on your Windows login scripts, or NIS is you've got Linux or Unix clients. Using NIS on your Linux clients will also provide your users with a roaming desktop environment.
PS. With a little playing, you can set yup the same thing using a combination of policies and profiles on a Windows box, but between NT and 9X, its a massive kludge.
I ran across one of these mobile phones from Samsung.
:(
The phone comes with a built-in mp3-player and 32M of storage. The storage can be used for other data too. It connects to the PC thru the lpt port and the software seem windoze only
Has anyone seen a better product with the same concept yet? (USB+multiplatform drivers etc..) This is probably one of the next steps in the mobile phone industry..
Personally, I love Compact Flash. It is so widespread that a lot of totally different devices use it, ranging from PDAs to digital cameras to desktop computers to whatever. No need for cables, just switch the Flash.
I am so surprised that some people still insist on using floppies when there are so many network based alternatives. Setup centralized file server that allows people to access their files with SMB, ftp, scp, or http etc from school or from home.
In my school there is at least one centrally managed service that includes 30MB of disk space, and access to the files with scp, ftp or http.
CD-RW drives are selling for under $100 these days, and CD-R / CD-RW discs are under 50 cents. That's a lot cheaper than my first floppy drive and floppy disks, respectively. Try installing cheap CD recorders in each computer, along with a UDF tool like DirectCD. I'd wager that recordable CDs will provide better data integrity, lifetime and (undoubtedly) value than floppies. (I rarely get three uses from a floppy before it goes bad.)
Your assumption that CD-RW drives are expensive is a false one. You can get internal CD-RW drives for as little $94 (+S&H) nowdays, which seems relatively close to your target price. (As with most components, buying the rock-bottom cheapest isn't necessarily a good idea, but hey, if that's what you can afford, that's what you get.) And media costs have dropped dramatically too, with CD-RW disks being basically $1 a piece for 650 MB capacity. For low-end prices, check out Pricewatch (no affiliation).
There is another slightly older alternative, the ZIP drive. OEM internal drives are as little as $34 +S&H at pricewatch, with media costs running ~$5-10. There are three significant problems with this approach: 1) reliability, 2) single source issues, and 3) obsolescence. In my experience, ZIP drives are not particularly reliable. There's a fairly well-known phenomena called the "Click of Death" (do a google.com search to find out more) that plagued drives during one period (my sister's ZIP drive had this) and there was a huge class action lawsuit against the ZIP maker Iomega. Second, the ZIP drive standard is essentially owned by one company, Iomega, so your ability to switch to alternatives is limited if you run into problems or if Iomega jacks up prices and gives up competing on the merits to optimize their profitability (as they should). With CD-RW you have a variety of drive manufacturers competing voraciously for marketshare and prices will continue to drop substantially. And third, ZIP is a standard on its way out. People used it when CD-RW drives were $300+, but with CD-RW drives now under $100, the alternative fits a much broader set of consumer needs. ZIP media has smaller capacity and is less versatile: you can't just take it to any student or faculty or employer's PC unless they too buy a ZIP drive. Every computer is built with at least a CD-ROM reading device... the power of network effects is all on the side of CD-R(W).
There are two basic uses of removable media: 1) moving files between PCs and 2) backing up your PC. For a drive standard to be widely adopted you have to meet both of those reasonably well. Backing up a 10 GB drive with a 100 MB ZIP is obviously a return to the problems of swapping floppies and is one reason CD-RW is picking up steam over ZIP. The other is the rising interest of people in 3) making audio CDs, something that CD-RW has made very popular with the teenage and college crowd as well as the mainstream public. Wannabe successors to the CD-RW drive (cough, DVD, cough) ignore consumers' interest in doing so at their peril.
Buying ZIP and trying to get 20,000 students to go along with your choice would be penny wise and pound foolish. You'd end up having to support the ZIP standard for the next 15 years when its already on its way out and has about 5 more years of life left. (Insert wild hand waving gestures here... ;) We may never have something as completely ubiquitous as the floppy was. But with steadily dropping prices, the CD-RW drive is coming increasingly close. ZIP won't be the next floppy. CD-RW will.
--LP
Yeah, it is. I got the first iMac when it came out, and haven't used floppies since.
Someone came out with a free webservice where I could up/download my work (3mb limit at the time). iMacFloppy.com -- he planned to come out with PCFloppy.com, not sure if he did. However, it's not Mac-centric anyway, only in name.
This was a great alternative. I'm a CS student, a relative newbie MF/PC/Web coder, so I had to use it quite a lot.
I also used some of the free website space at HotBot.com for this -- that's not what it was meant for, but it served my purpose.
Now I either e-mail the data, or FTP it up/down to/from my domain account.
As far as Zips, someone said people don't use them. I got one in my G4 almost a year ago, and still have good intentions to back-up my critical data to the zips...
"C'mon, donkey-boy!!"
Crystalize your tears, dried upon The Cross
Blood drips on your pain, time to ride The Light
Imation sells disks that hold 120 MB, have the same dimensions as regular 3,5" disks, and the drive can also read old (1.44MB) disks. These things rock. The drive will cost you about $75-$100 or something.
Castlewood manufactures 2.2 GB portable disks that cost $30 each (the drive is a little expensive though)
IOMega sells 100 and 250 MB disks for around $10 or so
I'd advise you to try the Imation drive, then decide for yourself whether you like it. I sure did.
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
Sony have a similar product, HiFD. Apparently it's faster than LS120, holds 200Mb and of course, is not compatible.
While the LS120 is slower than a zip, it's main advantage is that it completly replaces the floppy drive. Yes you can boot from it on new motherboards, and linux recognises it just fine (/dev/hd ). Also, with syslinux you can boot small distros, such as LRP and get the same advantage as with a normal floppy: You can write-protect the media, easily.
It's just the thing you need for backing-up your data... if it weren't so expensive (both the drive and its media)
Just on a side note, I've read the new superdisk drives will let you format normal floppies to up to 32Mb, but can't find the reference to this anywhere... any link?
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"Hasta la victoria siempre!" El Comandante
Floppy disks are not "semi-disposable", they are just "disposable". If you've been using the same one for more than a week then you're asking for a visit from the bad sector pixies. Replace regulary.
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all of its self proclaimed `successors' simply aren't standards because they're all tightly controlled by a single company.
Sad but true. After a wave of progress (3 1/2 to replace 5 1/4, HD to replace DD) the floppy disk more or less came to a halt after CD-ROM and HD took over.
It certainly is time for a new standard; this is not possible however as long as every notebook you buy and every pre-setup desktop computer you buy comes with a floppy drive.
I personally favor the ZIP drive, it is moderately fast (SCSI version, at least), and pretty reliable given the fact that it is not optical, but the price for a medium is not acceptable.
Many people choose your approach of simply using CDRs, yes, they're cheap, yes, CDR is standard and can be read almost everywhere, but that's an immense waste of resources! Especially when using the 650 MB media for 10 MB sessions! Hardly anybody employs multi-session CDs, and when you move over to CD-RW you're losing the "de-facto standard" argument. Besides, if you compare the cost of a CD-RW drive to that of a ZIP drive w/ one medium, you'll lose the price argument as well.
Furthermore, I consider the purpose of a CD is a different one: The data they contain is supposed to last longer. Floppies (and ZIP media) on the other hand were made to contain data that can be read, written, and re-written quickly.
So for "long-term data", we have a standard: CD-R. Our current standard for "short-term data" however, floppy disks, is hopefully obsolete. Time for a new standard, although this is always a pain and slow process. Look at how LaserDiscs tried to replace VHS and failed. Look at how MD tried to replace audio tapes and failed.
As an answer to the original question: Although it's a compromise, I'd go for ZIP drives.
Hi,
if you want a reliable replacement for floppy disks, you will need some characteristics:
1) reliable,
2) Media not too expensive
3) Non-Proprietary (so they will be still around in some years)
CD-RW/Zip are more reliable than floppies, but I have had data loss with both. The one solution I can really recommend is MOD. The added benefit is that the disks have the look and feel of floppies (even the same size) while being larger and extremely reliable. The downside is that the drives are expensive.
Expect these prices (for 640MB drives that can also use 230MB and 128MB media):
Drive (fujitsu): $ 300
Drive (Olympus): $ 200
Disk 640MB: $ 10
Disk 230MB: $ 5
Also expect that bad media will be a thing of the past, or if somebody spills cola over their disks, that they can be cleaned with de-ionized water and soap (carefully).
IMO if reliability is a prime concern, MOD is the only satisfactory solution available today. And it also has a clear long-term perspective, as the manufacturers are commited to support at least the last 3 generations of media in new drives (at the moment they support all). The media are ISO standardized and are read/written without contact to the surface.
If you ask about these drives somewhere, insist on 3.5 inch MOD, There are also 5.25 inch MODs but they are far more expensive (in the order of $3000 for a 5.2GB drive and $70 for a 5.2GB disk).
Gweihir
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted and ignored otherwise.
...covered in some other emails, but here's an analysis of some of them, and implementation methods as well.
Floppy disks - low capacity, slow, unreliable. not a great option, though fine as a secondary/tertiary backup.
Flash media - fast, low-medium capacity, reliable, and some of these can even be used in floppy drives using an adapter, obviating the need for a special drive. however, they are VERY expensive per megabyte, and won't drop any time soon. also they are small and easy to lose.
Zip drives - high capacity (100-250M), reasonably fast (scsi and usb), reasonable reliability (i've never had problems, though they are still potentially affected by strong magnetic fields?). the drives are somewhat expensive, but the media is cheap and getting cheaper all the time, especially the 100s.
Jazz drives - very high capacity (1-2G), reliable, fast, but very expensive. at something like $100 a disk, that's a bit much.
LS-120 - reasonable capacity, not too fast, about as reliable as floppies, heh. bonus here is that a LS-1230 drive can read floppies as well, so if you need to upgrade many machines to do this, you can simply replace the floppy drives instead.
other options exist, such as:
Provide network backup - set up a system (web-based?) where users get X amount of storage to access from wherever they want. reliable, fast internally, versatile, though may be an unneeded maintainance headache (warez kiddies, etc)
CD-RW - fast read, slow write, high capacity, high reliability. media is kind of expensive - at this point it's usually worth going for CD-R instead, the media is so cheap it's expendable, and writes faster. writable drives are still costly though, especially reliable ones.
What will probably accomplish more is instilling a good sense of backup in your people, if possible - encourage them to make backups regularly and often, on at least two separate media, and how to treat the media.
What may clinch it for one over another here though is how you implement it. obviously every machine has a floppy drive (or not?), but you may be able to attach a resource to the network, say one per 10 machines, used for backup purposes, instead of bolting one onto every machine. this would lower the installation costs of something like cd-r and zip, which are my two recommended options in this sort of installation. cd-r for portability (and implicitly usability elsewhere in any cd reader), zip for backups.
Fross
I would not be surprised if many of these students neglected to complete their assignment and intentionally bring in a floppy that is corrupted. This is not to say that floppies are dependable, but when unreliable technology is prevalent, it makes an easy excuse.
| Ceci n'est pas une pipe.
The only solution to this problem is to properly educate your users of the merits of backing up data. It does not make any difference what type of technology you use for media, all of them will fail eventually. Removable media has the additional problems that it can be stepped on, cracked, crushed, spilled on, etc.
I would suggest that you let instructors know that they should remind their students to keep at least one backup copy of anything even remotely important. One of the simplest solutions has already been mentioned: keep data on two floppies. Another solution is to keep one copy on a floppy and another copy on your personal network drive. Keeping an additional copy on the hard-drive at home doesn't hurt either.
This solution is extremely easy to implement. My Systems Analysis and Design professor did exactly this when we began working on our 10 page+ reports. She said something like "Every year someone manages to loose their data and have to retype it all in to make the final project report. Be sure to keep multiple copies of everything." That one simply statement will fix most of your problems.
If you want to get a little more high-tech, there is a very good mod_dav for Apache that works with Microsofts Web Folders among other DAV clients. If you are unfamiliar with Web Folders, it's a lot like a network drive except it is an HTTP extension and unfortunately cannot be mapped to a drive letter. Also, I think the application needs to have some support for it to work like a real network drive. However, its absolutely great since you can download the content from ANY internet connected PC, and upload/download from internet connected PCs with MS web folders, this includes the users home PC. To the user it works basically like any other folder on the hard-drive. This is especially good if you are not a technically oriented campus.
In short, I suggest that you simply educate your users about floppy failures, explain how to use the network drive, and possibly set-up a DAV server for accessing content from anywhere on the net.
If people have a general knowledge about computer hardware and are not paranoid about touching it then, use HDDs.
That is a very popular way of data transfer between experts and experienced users. In fact, for the last two-three years is the only form of data transfer I see being used apart from networks. Floppy drives are only used on booting computers and even this is dissapearing. Some computers are already living without their floppy devices attached to them.
Note that this practice is not only used by the geeks here. Even people like accountants and financial directors rip the cables of their HDDs without pitty and carry their "hard floppies" in their suitcases. The most funny was to see an woman accountant carrying a HDD in her VERY SMALL pursecase. It looked as if the HDD suddenly grew three times when she took it out.
A 3Gb HDD costs here almost 30 dollars. A package of floppies nears 10 dollars. Why I would pay for 43Mb if I can get 3Gb for that price?
The place that used to work as a lab manager, the U of Maryland-College Park, used two of the main ideas here on our NT systems.
Zip drives are on every machine. They are also on the Macs and some of the newer Sun boxes. The only thing holding people back is the cost of zip disks, being as how college students are cheap. They rather spend that kind of money on a $7.00 case of beer. Also, I've seen zip disks fail due to physical damage, but there is nohting you can really do about that. As far as physical media goes, it seems the best way so far.
There is also an AFS client that runs on all of our NT systems (Gina I think). It just maps a drive to your home space on your university account, which makes it much more automatic and simpler to use then FTP. Different drives are used for Home, Pub, Mail, etc. because some people are confused about changing directories. Suns use your university account, so that isn't a big deal. Most Sun users seems to be a bit more in-the-know. Macs have the Zip drives, but they also have ftp clients installed (Fetch is my personal fave). But it does have its problems. Most people don't know that these drives exist, or just ignore them because they never seen a Drive X: or drive W: before. Also, there are brief times when the network is overloaded. But there aren't really any space concerns, as each student gets around 25 megs per account. Note that your account also holds your NT profile as well as your Netscape settings for both the NT and the Unix systems, but 25 megs is plenty for the average user. Also, there used to be a few bugs with the AFS client we used, like the networked drives not showing up on some logons, etc. Most of them have been fixed as of now. And there are rare cases of the network being overloaded, but it is rare.
And yes, we have floppy drives. And our lab managers have lost-and-found boxes full of some of the abused floppies you will ever see. Bent in half, metal gates missing, overused AOL floppies that are used to store that "20 page paper". In my day, I showed people how to use the network drives AND their old-school floppies. They have a "copy" that they can hold in their hands, and a backup that can be gotten easily.
Assuming that you have a decent internet connection, you could encourage students to use one of the many online storage services. idrive.com has a university partnership program and is fairly easy to use for AOL-level users.
It's small (physically speaking), 8 MB-256 MB capacity, fairly cheap... (512 MB coming soon) http://www.thumbdrive.com
For small documents and other data, you just
can't beat emailing it to yourself. And maybe
CC a copy to your Yahoo mail account to.
As far as I'm concerned, floppy's aren't necesary anymore. If you need to backup something large, use CD-RW - otherwise, go with the network solutions. Pull a few cables if you have to, make people buy some netcards for their computers if they don't have already.
Of course it will happen once in a while that someone has to take some documents home to someone who hasn't got Internet. Floppy's can be useful in such a situation, but the original copy should still reside on the fileserver or Idrive.
Gorkman
As they say, you get what you pay for.
Just do what i do.
Email it. From home, i can email to my uni account, and any uni computer has access to the web, at least at our uni. Then i just use the email program, and can download the file to the current computer. No disk problems.
I though everybody did this...
[Re: CD-RW] media is kind of expensive Maybe in 1997 what you said was correct, but here in the year 2000 you've got it completely backwards. CD-RW media is cheaper than Zip media, by a long shot.
A simple pricewatch check shows that 6 dollars gets you either one 100MB zip disk, or ten 650MB CD-RW discs. In price per-megabyte terms, CD-RW media beats the heck out of Zip media.
It would be cool if Sony's Mini-Discs could function as floppy discs. I've heard it stores music in compressed format, but even still, you should be able to get 100MB out of them!
Fancy using crappy old 3.5" floppys in this day and age? I'm so sick of seeing these pathetic little Zip Drives and the like!
We really need some decent technology to piss these annoying little floppy drives off for GOOD! What about Memory Sticks? I know this isn't answering the original question, but Sony's Memory Sticks would be really good.
PS - I don't work for Sony, I just recognise the fact they make good shit! It would just be nice if they could think of other applications for their miracles of technology!
MF
A student could wak up to a machine, pop his thumbdrive in the front usb port, copy his data to his thumbdrive, pop it out and be off home. At home, his computer most likely has USB. Just pop in the thumbdrive and repeat.
Only Windows drivers currently, but Mac and Linux are supposed to be soon to follow. Its just flash ram... how hard could it be?
But think about it from the perspective of someone buying a few hundred or even thousand of them. The price goes up quick. They may not seem too expencive at first glance, but if you are getting one for every computer and, say, there is one computer for every three students then you have a real cost issue.
addi $v0, $0, 10 syscall
I purchased a CD-RW (4xwrite) for $150 last year and love it. Blank CDR disks cost me about .75 each and CDRW costs about $1 each.
I can't tell you how much source code I will never be able to recover because the floppy disks I saved them a few years ago can no longer be read.
When you backup to floppy disk, only consider it a short-term backup. They don't last very long. CDR has a limited life too, but I have yet to get read errors even after 10 years on my commercial CDs. I hope my CDR disks last as long.
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
Not being one to trust anyone on anything, a few years ago, I (along with a colleague) decided to embark on a little experiment to see just how easy it was to render a floppy unreadable. We were concerned about everyday risks (and this guy happened to be doing some research that involved small electric motors). So we tried leaving them on top of monitors for a few minutes, leaving them on top of speakers, and moving the magnet end of the motors across the surface of the disk at various angles. There was one small Word file on this disk (on a Mac filesystem), and we used the same disk throughout. Despite repeated trials, especially with the otherwise powerful (in the paperclip sense) motor magnets, we were completely unable to erase the file or damage the filesystem.
I believe at the time our scientific conclusion was that floppies are not based on magnetism, but on "tiny bubbles of ectoplasmic phlogiston." We never tried the condition where the file was the sole copy of some critical document, I don't know if that would have affected the results.
god hates me
Thats right. Pitch 'em.
Force them to use a network. Teach them how. Get the proper infrastructure in place. Yes this will cause you some short term pain. In exchange you'll have a simpler, easier to maintain network and in the long run, life will be better.
Floppies are not absolutely necessary components in a computer especially since it is very possible to boot off of CDs. If you must allow them to carry something let them access the CD drive and tell them they need a CD burner. (they aren't that expensive) If you are feeling nice, make a few workstations available where you have CD burners in place and let people copy their floppies to CD's there.
The sooner everyone take these steps, the sooner we can bury the floppy. It's overdue.
god also hates the MPAA
I would recon that the main possibilities are along the lines of
PCCard/PCMCIA Hard Drives
-Large Capacity (upto hundreds of MB)
-Widely usable as virtually every laptop has PCCard readers integrated and these readers can be obtained in 3½" form factor.
-The Drive itself isn't too expensive
-The PCCard HD is expensive
IOMega Jaz/Zip/Clik
-Large capacity (2GB/250MB/40MB)
-Drives are common (atleast Zip)
-Clik is small and beeing used in cameras
-Disks are relatively cheap
-Readers aren't too expansive (except Jaz) and available in 3½" form factor for IDE/SCSI/USB.
Castlewood ORB
-Large capacity (2.2GB)
-Drives are cheap and available for IDE/SCSI/USB
-The media is cheap
-New machine - no hard info on reliability yet
SmartMedia /MB
-Memory card is smallish and available
-Memory is expensive
-I have no idea on reader availability for PCs
-Used in cameras & mp3-players so multiusable
Sony Memory Stick
-MemoryStick is expensive
-Not yet in any other than Sony products
-Might be multiusable later on though
-I have no idea on reader availability for PCs
Compact Flash
-Memory Expensive
-Drives available for PCs
-I have no idea on reader prise though
-Small sized and presumably rugged design
-Small memory size
Well that sums up what I recall are the market players today. I deliberately left LS-120 disks and old SyQuest drives out because they seem quite dead today.
The main problem with all of these are relatively high cost of media and quite limited supply at normal shops (except Zip-disks). I Would prefer the ORB-drives as they have a good prise/performance and prise/capacity ratio. My only gripe about them is the ruggedness of its design - does it last hard use like in public access settings?
++ Raymond
Actually, unless I'm missing a shop selling zip media very cheaply, zip disks are inordinately expensive in Australia compared to what I'm hearing from the US. A$25 sounds about right - although I'd go looking for another shop to get CDRs from: A$2 is pretty expensive (I can get no-name ones for 70 cents, and the failure rate isn't too extreme).
Ever heard of click of death?
oh yeah, this password protection is a joke.
___
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
Don't have any removable media on the computers. This will force them to save any documents on the file servers.
Obviously some users are going to complain "how can i take my work home to my home computer?"
Keep the floppy drives (cheap/free - you already have them) just somehow make it impossible to save directly to them, but make it easy to copy from the file server to floppy!
To sum up, force it into their thick skulls to keep multiple copies
This can be very handy. I'm assuming that all your users have 10-20 Mb of space on a Unix server somewhere. Windows NT (which I am assuming you are using) has a number of AFS and NFS clinets that will allow you to mount the users' home directories as a drive. You can then set, in most programs, the default "Save To..." directory to be that networked drive. Then make sure to launch a large campaign to let users to know to save their work there.
--
Matt Singerman
Matt Singerman
http://matt.vegan.net/
What about the click disks, they're fairly cheap media and the hold about 40MB. And I haven't heard about them having the click of death.
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Just your ordinary BOFH
http://killertux.org
At my school, we have set up network file space for everyone as well. It is 20 megs of space which is accessable as a network drive from all the labs and from all the dorm rooms as well. Once the student is shown how the system works, they don't used floppies very much at all.
The only downside is that we are an all-Microsoft campus, so if you have a MAC you need to shell out some money to get a third-party program to map the network space as a drive in your room. But FTP works fine, and is quite inexpensive.
Not to launch too far on a tangent here, but this question partly stems from the fact that floppy disk quality been so crappy in recent years. It's not uncommon to lose 1-2 disks per box straight from the factory even when buying name brands like Sony or Maxell. 10 years ago before the dawn of "high tech" it wasn't uncommon for a single floppy disk to last 2-3 years while booting your OS every single day! At what point did they start making floppy disks from recycled iron filings and rusty nails?
Put up a warning and disk copy directions in the computer lab. These are college students. They need to learn to back up valuable data regardless of the media type. You offer server space and they don't use it? Again, they need to learn this. If they don't let them lose their data and flunk out of college because they are computer illiterate.
The university that I attend supports zip 100's on every machine on campus. After spending years hating Iomega, the one product company, I am now completely dependent on them. I can store all the work for all of my classes on one disk and have, what is almost, the same access speed for my documents as a real hard drive.
An internal zip for the home machine is as cheap as 50 bucks at the local computer store and for the less technically savvy a usb zip 100 can be had for 85 bucks on sale.
Of course data loss is an even bigger issue with these things and I have found if you don't use the software eject feature there is a huge chance of corrupting data. Floppies do the same thing when you take the away from an application that is using them.
Clearly CDR-W's are the future but their time has not come yet masses and bandwidth costs for all those stolen mp3's and apps would be huge in a university setting.
As far as Network storage, how much are you going to give them? I have tried that method and 5megs is worthless. I would need at least 50 Megs to make it worthwhile to use, since I can carry 100 Megs on one disk right now.
Go for the one-product companies' solution, Its not going away and its not so bad being a Iomega Victim.
What was really memorable was that even with *some* handheld magnets right next to the floppies, I didn't succeed in corrupting the data, iirc. With sufficiently powerful (rare earth) magnets, I did corrupt it, though.
At least one of the preceding posts about cell phones and microwave radiation is probably just uninformed nonsense. The magnetic fields from the sources mentioned are maybe a billion times too weak to have any effect. So few people study (and actually understand) physics that such nonsense may seem plausible; sorry to squawk.
What's surprising is that both floppy and "hard" drives contain some magnets that, if placed in contact with the recording surface, would surely erase the bit patterns. If you pull apart a hard drive, youll find that the magnets in the head actuator are remarkably powerful; their stray fields are well controlled, though.
Btw, didn't I read (in Debian?) somewhere about the importance of using only the best floppies for boot and image disks when setting up Linux?
I surely hope we don't need to do a Scramdisk on all floppies before recording important info.!
Enby the curmudgeon in Waltham, Mass.
We offer our students space on several file servers
Well, if this is the case, why don't you juse encourage the use of such file servers. I haven't had the use of a floppy disk in years because of the wonderfulness of file servers(Of course I just usually save it to a directory on my own box and remotely connect to it by http).
The main advantage of this is that you can forget your floppy, but if youre at a computer connected to the internet, then youre good to go. Start encouraging the students to use this...once they do, they'll never turn back.
One option I didn't think of until I saw it the other day is to use SmartMedia cards (or a Sony memory stick) with a floppy adapter. That's what Sony recommends for those floppy-based Mavica cameras. It's a bit pricey (about $60 for the floppy adapter, plus $40+ for the flash card), but you don't need anything special on the machine to deal with it. Shove the cost off on the students...
I've used compact flash cards to move things between laptops a lot and think they're perfect for this. I'm suprised they aren't more popular. The prices are coming down thanks to all the digital cameras. There's something a little Star Trek-ish about them too. You're probably about a year or two ahead of the curve in trying to adopt them now.
Good luck with students. I was in this position about 10 years ago and saw several students who lost their only copy of their thesis when their beat-up floppy finally died.
Didn't Steve Jobs solve this with the NeXT? I still have two magneto optical disks here. No drive to read them in though.
This works perfectly for nearly all students, the only problem is that they need to buy a $99 drive to use the disks at home. But this is worth the investment, Zipdisks are quite reliable (a lot more than "read-error" floppy's) and they can dump a whole lot of rubbish on a single disk.
And even without a zipdrive at home, the students can save loads of stuff to use on the campus.
Thats why i give Iomega and the Zip a thumbs-up, solely on what i have experianced on my school.
(Naturally i'm biased thanks to all those error-prone floppy's, destroying hours of work, but heck, zips are better anyhow...)
Now i think of it, has Iomega any competition on this subject?
This sig is intentionally left blank
So my comment is: Don't think CompactFlash is any safer than floppy disks. They still are very fragile. Also other things can go wrong: As they don't come with a good casing, dust/sand etc. can easily fill the small connector holes when they are carried in a pocket...
Just my $0.02 :-)
Basically I'm working a lot wih zips here, and event though me, my friends and collueges have really physically abused them at times I never even had as much as a bad cluster or ANY lost data, in the years i've been using them...
For me they are proven, not too slow (that is if you take ide or scsi: here most of the (beige) macs and pcs have scsi internal zips) and probably cheap by now. I don't know about the 250 variant, but for me, it's not worth it. 100 MB is plent for what i need, if we need more we write a CD.
One thing though: stay away from the JAZ... i can't begin to tell you how much horror stories i heard with these, esp. wrt reliability.
I don't know about things like orb and such, but if you go down that lane, you'd probably be willing to shell out for a CDRW.
go with zip. (you can also boot from them - recent motherboard bios support it for the ide, and with scsi it was never really a problem)
The problem with all backup media is they can degrade or be lost. There are dozens of free on-line backup services like Xdrive, Freeback, Yahoo Briefcase, etc. All are pretty reliable and secure, and give access to your data from wherever you happen to be.
The only problem is none of them give you a huge amount of space, but it is always lots more than a floppy disc. It should certainly be enough for university environments.
I use a PCMCIA reader (no moving parts) for a 3.5" drive bay, my CF ram came with a PCMCIA adapter, tab a into slot b insert whole thing into slot C wammo storage, i have a 15MB (yes 15)and a 64MB, i can write the 64 which is newer CF tech (sansdisk i think) in about a minute, erasing takes about 2, i've never lost a file (knock on wood) and move the memory between my didgital camera and a ce device quite often, i usually keep the 15 in my wallet it works great.
FTP (or far better scp) paired with ubiquitous internet access does the trick.
You can use that 50 megs your ISP gives you, or the school could even give some space on the local net.
Odds are, you already have all the hardware you need in place (or use that $40/drive to buy a big HDD to add to the server that would be providing the service.)
-Peter
Why don't you set up a storage server that's backed up nightly up by your university, and just let your students archive/retrieve their stuff on that storage server via the web?
Seastead this.
You have to realize this: Just because a student says the only version of there work was lost on a courrupt floppy disk doesn't mean it's true! What better excuse is there? :)
At my Uni we submit out work via a web-page.. the files are timestamped and entered directly in the departmental database.
Unfortunately computeres make cruel tutors. You only need to be 1 second after the deadline to for your work to be rejected!
This is a self correcting problem (believe me). When I first started out in programming, I'd almost always trash my programs the day before they were due. Then I learned how to backup. Haven't had a problem since. If you have students who don't backup for whatever reason (e.g. laziness, forgetfulness, stupidity), then maybe it's a sign that they're on the wrong path in life. This smacks of Technical Darwinism. The lowly will perish and the strong will not lose their work.
My advice. Teach them a couple times. Then forget about it. The cream will rise to the top.
What about giving (or using, if they already have it) disk space on a central server? In a university, it should be trivial to find a networked computer to access those stored data... Moreover, home access would also be trivial.
The reliability would be good, for server iron is usually better than average...
--
ZP
We only can learn from our mistakes.
ZP
We only can learn from our mistakes.
Whenever I use a floppy, I'll zip up the contents even if it's only a 30kb Word file. CRCs are a godsend, especially when a quick visual inspection of the file won't necessarily reveal corruption. (I wonder how many flaky ll3.exe's are lying around...).
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Consider that out of the 20K students at your university (and few hundred staff and faculty), maybe about half would be enthusiastic about a network drive. Multiply that by a quarter of your price point for the media drive, $10. $10 per student, times 10K students, equals a pretty beefy file server with RAID 5 and tape backup, with a little left over for setup costs and training.
If your university is anything like mine, $100k isn't the kind of money you'll be able to easily lay your hands on. If you're low in the procurement food chain, you'll need to make the argument to your higher-ups. If you're higher in the food chain, you may already have this kind of cash in the budget, but if not, be prepared to defend your decision to funding sources. Write up your understanding of the problem, as well as costs for competing solutions. You may even want to consider doing a straw poll of students to see which they'd prefer: new media types, a file server, or keeping the status quo.
The only really reliable backup I have ever seen is hard copy i.e. printout. Second choice is redundancy, i.e. two or three copies on separate floppies, zips or whatever.
If I was writing a dissertation I'd be sure to have a hard copy (refreshed say monthly) and a couple of magnetic or optical copies around just in case.
www.usbdrive.com/products
One year, I had a 80 page document I had printed out for proofreading on the subway at 1AM on the way home from the University which I lost the soft copy of due to uploading the wrong version, overwriting the file on our SGI. Doh. I spent five hours retyping the sucker and didn't sleep.
In my fourth year, I had written an excellent paper and left it up on our NT box to retrieve from home to finish. Needless to say, when I got home, our @home connectivity was down till 4AM.
I suppose this is largely due to the fact people tend to be unsympathetic to me saying "My computer broke" having run a research lab's systems for three years.
Calum
You know those "Hard-Drives-in-a-drawer"? Of course, you need a 5'1/4 bay for them, but I've seen them at 40$(CDN) a piece for the rack. Students would need to provide their own hard drives. They could get a very cheap one +- 100$. Here's what it looks like. I've used them. Very parctical. http://www.anime.net/~gigagon/rh/rh06.htm
Before going out to look for a new method of saving things, why not use what's available? Floppies are still the best bet for the money and, if they are handled properly, work just fine. (I do miss the old 5-1/4" floppies simply because I just popped one in from 1986 and it works perfectly even though I used to "transport" it over to my friends room across the hall frisbee style almost daily.)
Beyond this, students should save everything to the network as well. I'm no longer in school and so I save everything up to a stupid Yahoo account or something like it (depending on how secretive I'm feeling at the moment). Between the two, I'm pretty much set.
Last thing about floppies. I said above that they should be handled properly. My proper handling is to toss it into a stuff sack, bungee it to my bicycle and ride the three and a half miles from home to work and back. The only failure I have had in three years came when a bungee snapped, the bag slipped and caught between the tire and the rack of my bike. The friction burnt a hole in my bag and melted the plastic casing of my floppy. Just for fun I took the floppy apart, put it in a new case and had all the data back again.
Why not use what's already there and almost free?
Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.
There is a new producut i have just found, the Trek Thumbdrive. It is a USB solid state hard drive and come in sizes of 8 - 256mb. at the low end this cound be just what you are looking for. I have no idea where you can get it in the states, but in australia you can get it from http://www.agate.com.au and no, i don't have any association with any of these companies.
Around term-paper time my senior year of high school, I remember a few people in our very small senior class (a whopping 14 of us) griping about how a floppy had eaten their important term paper. The smarter ones had a copy on their hard disks at home. One unlucky girl didn't, and I was called in to try to read the disk.
"I ran, um, Scandisk on it...five times," she said.
"And you're surprised you have corrupt data?" I almost said, but I kept silent.
I took the disk home, took it to my Linux machine, and it read the file okay. I noticed the disk was very old and the little metal thing stuck when it tried to slide back. I transfered the file to several different formats on five different disks and drove the 10 miles to the girl's house.
All right, I guess the girl may have had an excuse to think floppies were the medium of the day. She was using a 386 with a character-mode word processor (Maybe Wordperfect somethingancient). Apparently, it was a very simple case of PEBKAC* "Oh, Windows is broken on this computer, I hate it."
Turned out the file formats I'd saved it in (txt and rtf seemed pretty reasonable to me) -- neither would read quite properly on her word processor, so she spent the evening taking strange little characters out of each sentence of the ten-page document.
I offered to save the file in a more readable format, but the girl's mother stepped in. "Bethani, ** she's done more than enough for you. Why don't you let her go home, and you just get all the stuff cleaned out of your paper by yourself, okay?"
Relieved, I left.
I will, on occasion, run a half-block away from here (my res hall) to the Science Center to print something off, on a floppy, but I always have a backup on my drive. I do this less and less lately as I ftp things up to my favorite ftp server and simply retrieve it from one of the workstations. Floppies do have their uses, but those uses can really only be counted on to be hackish runs to the lab to print something, or boot media.
* (PEBKAC-Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair.)
** (Names changed to protect the innocent.)
Angry IT woman in big clompy boots. And talking lint!.
I suggest looking at a CDRW-drive solution. Each computer lab is fitted with 1 CDRW drive, and each student is provided with a CDRW disc. When a student wants to take something home, they burn it onto their CD. Easy. =)
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CitizenC
If you do use floppies regularly, you should be using them this way:
1) One-time file storage for temporary transfer. They are not permanent storage devices. This bears repeating until somebody silk-screens it on the front of t-shirts.
2) Do not carry the floppy around loose in your back pocket, wallet, purse, knapsack, book bag, pencil box, lunch box or thermos. A floppy disk is not a book mark. A front shirt pocket is perfect, if the disk is wrapped. If you have a plastic sleeve or floppy holder, use it. A Zip disk case will hold at least two floppies. This will increase the likelyhood that the floppy will work as intended and keep lint, sweat and fuzz out of the disk.
3) Do not work off/from the floppy. Copy the file you want over to the hard drive first, work on it there, then copy it back if necessary. This will prevent errors from interfering when saving your document. If you find that you cannot copy the document over, or you find that once the document is copied to the drive, there are problems or errors, you save yourself the grief of finding out later when you lose all the work you just did.
4) Consider using a "safety" folder on the disk which contains an extra copy of your important document. Do not make a duplicate of the folder already on the floppy. Instead, copy the document afresh from your hard drive to the safety folder. This is common practice in the creative world, a legacy from pre-Zip, pre-Jaz days when Syquests and floppies were standard.
5) If you don't have server access, consider mailing a copy of a document to yourself using free web email accounts. Make sure to use at least two services at a time as they are unreliable. This will allow you to avoid faulty or unworking floppy drives as well, which in a busy lab situation can mean the difference between getting right to work or waiting for the "good" machine.
Spread the word! Tell everyone! Post signs! How many times have I tried to explain that floppies are unreliable, tempermental and not to be trusted only to find that people don't believe me? They think I'm making it up. Really.
I used to run the IT department for an advertising agency in which one of the users saved *everything* to floppy because she believed her hard drive was untrustworthy. She had hundreds of disks. (Of course, this is the same woman who printed out all of her email messages and filed them alphabetically).
Wordnik, a dictionary project which aims to collect
For the Thumb Drive, go here.
For a review of the Sony Memory Stick Reader, go here. Now, all you need to do, is to move the USB Ports to the front of the computers!
\\'ilson
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My mobile is automatically activated by the contact between the toilet seat and my ass...
If you live in the UK, you can get a fairly cheap USB 100Mb Zip drive if you buy it from gb.buy.com.
So you get the drive itself for £55.22, anything else to take the cost up to £60 (like a blue zip-up 24-CD case (not Zip-related, but still; might be handy sometime), and then use the £30 off £60 coupon for new users (I believe it figures out new users from looking at credit card numbers) that you can get from here.
... meaning that you can get a new 100Mb USB Zip drive for a total of £30.74 with free delivery :-)
I would suggest using a Handspring Visor! It's got 8MB RAM and you can store files in it. I'm not sure if an application exists to store arbitary files there, but I'm sure it's easy to develop one. Not only a good file repository but an indispensible tool as well.
If students want to use a temporary transport medium, how about something like X-Drive that works with any platform that can support a Netscape browser? Or IE or iCab or whatever else. Free email services are everywhere but free, small sized, temporary file storage isn't on the radar. Weird.
If it's small enough to fit on a floppy, it's small enough to shunt around even on a 28.8k modem.
How about ftp? It works, you can save multiple copies and it is backed up and protected. I have not lost any data from an isp since a crash at a small isp in '95. Most os' have some sort of ftp program (yes even MicroShaft WindBlows). I use it daily, I no-longer have to carry around 10 pounds of cds and disks, as i put everything i need somewhere that it is available to me via an internet connection. At a college this should be very easy, even if you must instruct lUsers on how to use the gui ftp program ...* ****
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A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
I truely have a pile of floppies with hundreds of disks and after about 1 year of not using them, even the brand new ones,I'm convinced that more than 99% of them not only lose their data, but also lose their capability to be reused. Th best solution: Network backups! All you have to do is decide the load, and use workgroup, departmental and campus wide servers. 20,000 students with 8MB of data on the server each is about 400GB, which is about $2300 worth of hard drives in a server (using generic 70GB IDE drives from a price I pulled out of my head). Not a bad price to a 20,000 user environment, and, centralized data is very convenient. I don't even put floppy drives in most of my computers any more! I hope this helps.
.sig
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Intelligence should not be rewarded; ignorance should be punished
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Intelligence should not be rewarded; ignorance should be punished
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So your school is supposed to by equipment for everybody to use? What about the media? Do students pay for it? How will they transfer data to their own PCs?
I don't think these questions are for you or your school to worry about. I can imagine a lot of people come to you with their sob-stories about lost data, but what makes it your responsibility to protect them? You are offering enough protection in the form of a file server.
I suggest you stop trying to play savior; it's a waste of your time and your employer's money. When people come to you on the verge of tears, you ought to say, "Hey, we've warned you about diskettes. Maybe next time, you won't rely on them. Now get out of my way." I can assure you that, of the people that have already lost critical data, no one relies solely on floppies any more. You have to get fucked to learn, so let it happen.
Unless, of course, the one who lost data is some really hot girl, in which case you should be simpathetic and sensitive to her needs. Oh yeah...
I do not belong in the spam.redirect.de domain.
Basically it is like MD technology but completely portable, opto-mechanical and is backwards compatible with the good old floppy.
They also hold anywhere from 120 megs to 200 megs depending on the brand and type of drive.
Get your PostgreSQL here: http://www.commandprompt.com/
I have had the same experience as you when it comes to the reliability of floppies. I.e. I can't use them on the machine in my office and take them home an hour later and expect them to work. Both of my machines have clean drives even (in fact both are relatively new).
When I am working under Linux (and I am), I use a little program called fdecc to improve my odds. It uses the secondary FAT to record error correcting data. On a 1.44M floppy I can have several bad sectors and the disk is still recoverable. This has been a real convenience many, many times.
You really have to check it out for yourself if you use floppies:
After being a student computer lab nerd for 3.5 years, I can easily say that user training and documentation (and enforcement) is more important than selecting a different form of portable media. The floppy should still be fine for regular documents, should only be used for a document at a time, and its contents should only be a clone of something stored on served, backed-up, intranet-accessible disk. I think you should, instead of worrying about this, make sure your network and server infrastructure is sound. Besides, if you put different (which means larger) portable media in, your commuter students will use it to warez, pr0n and napster to it to bring home.
Besides, the university is the place where people learn how to live in the real world, in theory. Maybe losing a critical file and having to retype from the last printout draft is a great way to teach people to SAVE and make tested BACKUPs..
Your Working Boy,
And we liked it!
I have some games and other software that have been kept in storage for over 15 years (Apple II), most still readable. It seems that 3.5 inch disks are MUCH less reliable than the older media. I still use 5.25 inch disks to store lots of docs. I have started moving them onto CD-Rs. Friends give me the drives (Teac still seems to be the best) and disks by the box full. These 1.2 Meg 5.25 inch disks seldom fail even though they are at least 8 years old. The newer 3.5 inch disks are mostly for making "boot disks" and utilities. I wouldn't trust my kids doodles to one of these.
Almost all students have some E-Mail accounts and Internet address. Have them E-Mail themselfs and attach the Files to them. This is a common practice at my school for the non computer experts. The computer experts usually save it on the Server and FTP or Samba it from there homes. But almost everyine uses E-Mail and there is usually at least a 5meg quota on there accounts usually around 10megs or so. So there is pleanty of space to send the info. This has been used with a lot of success and it is lot safer then floppies that get bent in bags or stressed from magnetic fields from whatever odd things they may be doing that day.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Simple solution: don't provide one. Let your students use one of the free web-based services such as Driveway.com. If you'd prefer a more transparent solution, here's some information about how it's done here at Penn State: Penn State has OEM 100 MB zip drives in every lab computer, both Macs & PCs. I'm not sure about the Sparcs and other Sun machines... I don't ever use them. Students and faculty each have 25 MB server storage available to any user who requests it, which appears as a mapped hard drive on PCs. Mac users don't have the network storage option. Using a DFS client, PC users can access their files remotely from any PC on the Internet. Another Penn State option is FTP. All students and faculty recieve several MB of FTP space they can use for their website OR any files they want to store there. The primary advantage here is that it is accessible from any platform with an FTP client.
Since I have gotten DSL, I haven't touched a floppy. I took my old computer, installed linux on it, and have it running ftp. I move files to and from home via the box. I always have backups, and everything works fine.
However, you can't expect all of the kids to have high speed permanantly connected machines at home. So instead, set it up so that they can get to their files at home via the internet, either via ftp, or if you are feeling really snazzy, through some sort of web interface.
Make this available, and cut back on the number of machines that have floppy drives. Tell the students to use this system, and implement some manner of policy that disk errors are no longer valid excuses for not hadning in an assignment.
With a policy like this in place, kids will have to come up with a better excuse. I have personally many a time pulled some manner of computer related problem over on my non-technical teachers. Floppy disks are unreliable, and so rather than just telling them (nobody ever listens) something needs to be done to force them to listen. Its not overly harsh, and it should get the job done.
Captain_Frisk
...is to simply remove the floppy drive, and replace it with nothing. Just yank them all, and stop worrying about it. Through a proper amount of re-education and propaganda, you can force your flock to do whatever it is you like. Make them all save things to a fileserver. It's for their own good. I mean, if any group needs to learn proper respect for authority and submit to centralized control, it's college students.
This seems like the idea oppurtunity to publicize a rant of mine. See Why I don't like Iomega JAZ drives.
A simple plastic case, a la floppy disks, would do wonders for their longevity. Was this another plot by the music and motion picture industries to screw us, or what?
...which would be why my cd-rom is a caddy load. it's cheap, it's easy, and i've *never* scratched a cd in it. a pity that caddies are so obsolete.
--saint----
Got sick of getting jammed by inconsistent floppies, so I installed mod_dav and mod_ssl into apache and "mount" the sucker using web folders for windows. If yah tried this, you could buy a box or two or four (HW/RAID 5, 4 CPU's, FC/AL, 2+ GB RAM, TEST IT FIRST!), (charge each student like 2-3$/meg of remote storage), that should be fully capable of handling the load (it would be prudent to check the scaling prior to purchase, but it shouldn't be too bad to verify the scalablility using a bit of perl to emulate a population of client file operations.)
You don't want students plugging their own drives into computers, or media into drives. They will break something.
mod_dav isn't very quick for file transfers (256 kB/sec), (dunno why, the cable modem I'm on isn't rev limited upstream yet..., maybe some funky locking semantics in mod_dav, haven't looked at it yet.)I also have slow as crap ide drives on my box.
The nice thing about this solution is that it is usable thru any firewalls which permit tcp outbound 80/443.
As for the caddy, I recall Apple drives that used to have a huge chunky plastic thing that you put the cd in before you could insert it into the drive, is that what you're talking about?
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Why not just force them to use proper backup procedures by posting in central locations around the computer lab that floppy demise will not be an accepted excuse for losing work?
1) The primary one that I have been using for the past ten years is to store my stuff on the network. In prcatice it is far more reliable than any portable media. The space is limited depending on what the sysadmins policy on quotas for students might be. This can be a problem for people working with large graphics files. At my school this is recognized and the students that need it are given up to 500MB of quota. For the rest of us... even the most prolific CS student or English major is not gonna use much more than 5-10M in their entire time at the uni (often much less) even using MS-Words appetite.
2) When I need to move large amounts of data I have a small device the size of a pack of cigarettes. It is an old laptop drive (1.4G). This works very well for me and I can even "hotswap" it between Linux machines. The cost was kinda high US$80 for both "base" units that fit in a 2.5" drive bay. The disk was "free" because I replaced the one in my laptop with a larger one. But "low" capacity laptop disks can be had for cheap. This solution has been extremely reliable and fast. I have been using it for the past two years with no problems. I only use this solution for large transfers of data that would be too time consuming from my home PC (56K).. to school and back.
By far the best solution would be to invest in more shared disk capacity on the servers at the school. As far as network reliability... it would still be cheaper to invest in a more reliable network. The network shares are shareable across all known platforms, at least from a Linux/BSD server. This would cost next to nothing for the school to implement.
Removeable media of the floppy, zip, etc variety are very unreliable. I would certainly not trust my semesters, let alone my lifes, work to a flimsy bit of plastic that is gonna bang around in a plastic case in my bookbag. Students are forever losing and/or mangling their removeable media... add to that the floppy drives, zip drives, etc all get mangled and broken in the labs eventually.
-DU-...etc...
Why have a floppy disk ?
When you can have a hard disk...
After all the chicks really love a hard disk.
I'd still go for CD-RWs, personally.
You've already got CD-ROMs in the machine, which can simply be replaced by CD-RWs on the spec sheets of new machines. So, the cost comes down.
Now, looking at retailers in the UK, floppy drives cost £15 each. CD-ROMs are going for £30, CD-RWs for £120 so we have an additional cost per machine of £75 if we replace both floppy and CD-ROM with a CD-RW. Hardly huge. The other sensible suggestion - LS120 - would cost £70 and you'd still need a CD-ROM, so the cost extra for that would be £55. For which you have to use media 5 times smaller and 5-6 times _more_ expensive.
If you stick with RWs, burning the CDs is really easy. If you then add DirectCD (lovely program) it's no different from using any disk. Yes, this requires the users to fit the drives to their own machines - but the same is true with anything other than HDD floppies. And the cost per megabyte is _tiny_ compared with any competitor.
Really, if you're committed to removable drives for the students, CD-RWs are by far the best.
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
Newest HPs and Compaqs have USB ports in little lidded bays on the front of the machine. With so many digital cameras and other 'guest' devices like these, it's a great idea.
I use SanDisk's CompactFlash reader, but SanDisk also makes similar SmartMedia readers. Often, the digital camera you buy will help you make the decision on what sort of removable media you use. :)
The other solution to this is to get a small unpowered USB hub, and put it wherever you want. The only USB device that I have that won't run on an unpowered hub is my scanner, so it takes power from my second motherboard port.
Now, if only SOME camera company would make a simple cradle solution so I don't have to keep fussing with tiny power and download plugs and removable media at all!
[
I remember back in 1992, I was the local Novell administrator for my small college while still a student. Every few days, another student would come to us computing center guys and show us a floppy diskette that looked like a it had been dragged through the mud. Of course, it had the only copy of their term paper. Eventually, I made a proposal: buy a new hard drive for the Novell server -- enough for 1 megabyte for every student, and get students to use that for their primary storage. (Novell has the ability to enforce strict user disc quotas.) The response was intense skepticism. Why would that work? It was seen as too expensive, even though the alternative was much pricier. And unfortunately, people just don't understand network storage, even today. People do learn how to create complex tables in Microsoft Word, for example, but never learn the basics of how to be an efficient LAN user. So I think the solution is two pronged: network storage and user education.
I am not a lawyer.
In college we had a CAD lab full of IBM Aptivas. The problem with these machines was that the only way air could travel through the front of the boxes was through the floppy drive.
The instructor told everyone about how to use their floppy disks. He didn't even bother touching on the subject of the Netware file server we were logging into. Just that we had to log in to use the computer.
I had been using floppy disks when I was young and knew all about floppy unreliability. I saved everything to my network drive. I couldn't access the network drive from home so I copied them to my VMS account before logging off. Great.
Not a single other person in my class did that. They used floppies. When we first went in there was one computer with a bad floppy drive. I ended up using that one, no problem. Later on when the other floppy drives started failing, I ended up teaching them how to use their network drives (easier than floppies, imo).
Well, they copied the files to their network drives, then temporarily used another computer to save to floppy. a little better, but used only as a workaround. If they were at a computer with a working drive, they'd skip the network drive thing altogether.
I pushed the entire time, directly to a lot of people, the benefit of using UNIX accounts with NFS mappings. They finally started doing it after I finished... Oh well.
That said, I think the best solution is education. Have a seminar during orientation. Have a refresher at the beginning of each course requiring computer labs. That will help an awful lot. A number of people will have to unlearn things, but the earlier the better.
Remember, only you can prevent floppy disks.
I accidently left a bunch of various disks and tapes in the attic over the summer heat (140F in the attic. This is Phoenix.) 90% of the 1.4M 3.5in floppies were wasted. About 3/4 of the 1.2M disks were unreadable. Only half of the 720K and 360K floppeis had problems.
Meanwhile the games on casette (for the C64) were all intact! Zero problems. I guess audio cassettes were DESIGNED to survive being cooked on the dashboard in locked cars parked in the Sun.
At the University I just graduated from, we used a centralized network storage. Several SAMBA servers were set up- one daemon for each letter of the alphabet (by last name - USPACE-X where X was the first letter of the user's last name), so daemons could be shifted and balanced as needed by load requirments. The actual storage was on large RAID arrays, that were routinely backed up by DLT. The storage was easily accessed by any computer on the network, and with a simple utility (really just updated the C:\WINDOWS\LMHOSTS file) you could access it off campus. You could even make a wwwfiles directory and enable personal web pages. it was 10MB quota per user, and there were about 20,000 students and faculty who had access to it. To make things easier, we even made a program to mount your user space automatically in Windows 9x/NT and MacOS. There is no longer a need for floppies there.
Not to mention that the site has online help and information, resulting in fewer questions and help desk support than introducing a new media.
Random Musings at Rum Smuggler
I do not have pointers to any products off-hand, but I can tell you one thing: The electrical and data interface on compact flash is the same as for an IDE/ATA hard disk. It is just the connector that is different, it has been minituarized to fit the smaller form factor of the compact flash card.
So, if you are looking for a cheap solution, there is probably some sort of really cheap IDE-to-CF converter that sits in a drive bay. I would expect such a device to cost less than $10 at retail, and probably a whole lot less if you want to buy 600 of them at one time.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Put up a couple of signs around the dorms in september, and (as evil as i am)I charge $5 to resurrect someone's dead floppy. It takes a lot to really kill them, and even then it is usually a quick fix to either place the disk itself in a new case because the little metal flap thingies got bent in a backpack. (do these have names?) Heck, you can use QBasic!! half the time to try and recover text files on a damaged disc. It's how I make my beer money! Let floppies live! Seriously though, you will never be able to get your students to use the network drives effectively. Though I would have to rank my university as moderate to low as a rating for the technological literacy of students, i doubt anywhere that you will teach this to the majority of your student body. Come on, the same students who you would teach how to use a network drive are the ones who are naturally inquistive enough to figure it out on their own. I know at least a dozen people who live on campus with Nic card built into their brand new 1.1ghz machine mom and dad bought them who still pay to use their AOL dial up accounts because they can't figure out how to dial four digits to get computing services to come to their room and configure the NIC..for free!! *sigh* The idea of the university automatically backing up files on machines nice..but in addition to the logistics, the big brother factor is a little too scary for me. Smart media is too expensive for college students.
We've all been heroes for a day when someone lost their important files because of a bad floppy, and we saved them. I remember one time, there was this really cute girl who called the system administrator, me, because her diskette failed. Knowing who she was, I raced to the student computer lab (I was a student myself and lived on campus), and proceeded to extract her WordPerfect document from temporary files that were left on the network. She was so surprised and happy that she gave me a big bearhug. Unfortunately, the documents turned out to be a love letter to her boyfriend, so I was out of luck again. But this whole thing brings up the important point that bad floppies give us geek-types a chance to impress other people with our skills.
I am not a lawyer.
At my school, the admins have given up on floppies, and encourage students to either email themselves what they are working on, put it on some sort of online data hosting thing, or just upload it onto a website if they have one. I think the net is so widespread that we don't really need floppies anymore. This year we got a new fleet of computers, which are the spiffy new imacs that don't have any floppy disk drives. The only problem is that sometimes it takes explaining to get people to actually email themselves their work instead of using disks.
So quick with fear you tiny fools!
Floppies are also fragile, VERY fragile. Left alone in the best circumstances they'll often bitrot in a few months. In the chaotic rough-n-tumble treatment of a students life they'll often last mere weeks reliably.
Number one killer of floppies by students? Headphones.
Particularly headphones dumped in the same backpack. HELLO - these are MAGNETS!!!! (Yes, /.'ers are rolling they're eyes but you wouldn't believe how many hs/college students have no idea of this & are shocked when told.)
Number two killer? Abused out-of-alignment floppy drives.
Particularly common on school computers these beaten-up drives caked full-o-crud are a disaster. US$5 mechanisms reading cheap warped floppies covered in crap, spending years filtering dust into their mechanisms, only to have a floppy get stuck inside and then pried out with the ungentle aid of some improvised tools & a panicking user. Machine A will write something that Machine B can't read but Machine D has a 50% of reading. It gets worse from there.
Third most common killer? Simple physical abuse of the floppy.
Repeated physical shocks. Detritus sifting in through the shutter while at the bottom of the 'pack. Being left in a sunny place to cook, dumped in a cold car trunk to freeze. Then of course there's the classic "Pepsi Syndrome".
So, what are the alternatives?
Super-High-density floppies have come & gone for several cycles. None have caught on, none likely will. Their limitations are all of the floppies limitations and their limited distribution doesn't make up for their extra capacity. Most folks don't care if you can save 4 or 50 meg on a floppy if you can't use it anywhere else.
Zip drives are all of the worst qualities of a floppy (slow, unreliable, same media but more fragile mechanism.) They're poorly built & at the end of their technology lifecycle anyhow. Many corporations are rueing the days they rolled them out en masse and are now banning their use for any critical material.
Orb drives? Sort of an "ultra-Zip" built by the refugees from SyQuest they've distinguished themselves with a delayed rollout, expensive media, and poor drivers. They're faster then the Zips but suffer all of the same media problems along with even less distribution.
Burnable CD's are less fragile but the burner costs more and in the hands of the unwary can often create "coasters" (don't interfere excessively with their disk access!) There's software available that does packet-writing to the CD and thus it appears to be simply another mounted drive (albeit a slow one) but it can be unstable itself & produces disks that aren't universally readable.
Portable hard drives were one idea for awhile. There was even a "DriveBay" spec that was floated. Unfortunately nobody ever really got behind it and it's died. One can still retrofit PC's with a similar sort of chassis to slot-load drives but they'll only accept certain designs.
SCSI drives are a long-time favorite of the Mac & publishing communities but with Apple's move from SCSI they too have waned. USB drives were popular for a week 'till folks discovered how painfully s-l-o-w they are. Firewire/1394/iLink (all different names for the same high-speed serial bus) have potential but their drives command a hefty newtech surcharge.
IBM makes an incredible line of microdrives ranging from 340 MB to 1 GB. These can be mounted in PCMCIA/Credit Card devices and slipped into laptops (& retrofitted desktops) but they also cost a bucket.
Unfortunately all of these drives share something in common - they're hard drives and to a great extent share their limitations. Abuse them a bit & they'll fail catastrophically. Even the ruggedized ones made for laptops have limitations that are daily exceeded in a student's life.
Solid State. The future of storage. It'll also require you to mortgage your future to buy. If you're gonna require folks shell out US$50-$200 for a chip it should hold enough to make it through the semester. Unfortunately that's not true of solid-state, not at today's prices and with MS Word files bloating to 20 MB each for a sigle major paper.
So, what to do?
Well, as you've seen once you abandon the floppy the choices are all either just-as-fragile, more expensive, and much less universal. Folks are using floppies 'cause they have them at home, in the dorm, at their off-campus jobs, etc. This won't work for exotic tech like the ones listed above. They all require significant costs to retrofit each campus machine plus each student must purchase the media for it and then it's pretty much useless or at least a major pain off campus...
As many, many folks have pointed out: Dump the media almost altogether.
Install a few central servers easily network-accessible and well maintained. Put a few well-maintained floppy drive equipped machines in each cluster of computers but otherwise drop support for them. Give all of the students a card detailing how to access them from both on-campus or from off-campus (home, work, other institutions, etc.) Teach all of the faculty how to accept material electronically. Set up special time-stamping directories with automated receipts so there's no "I emailed my assignment on time but you didn't get it" problems. Make sure the student's directories on the server's really are trivially accessible once they've gone through the password challenge, again both on & off campus. Support Windows networking, AppleShare IP, FTP, simple web-based access & WEBDAV, etc.
Novell Netware is fantastic at supporting large communities of users like this & has great educational pricing. Windows NT is popular for it's ubiquity & commonality with other installed systems on the campus. Linux is of course cheapest & infinitely flexible. Talk to your neighboring institutions to see what they're using & their experiences, attend a few conferences, you'll quickly get a good feel for where the trends are heading and what tools you really want to look into.
Wean folks from the physical-media habit. Yes, this will require a new set of skills on their part and things like passwords, encryption, & network security will now become much more important. On the other hand that all needed to be done anyway & in the long run is probably cheaper the supporting all of those floppy drives and their fried floppies.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
The MO media is a strong point. A hard plastic shell with a metal door protects the media from scratches, just like 3.5" floppies and Zip disks. But the media itself is relatively resistant to heat, humidity, impact, and magnetism.
In magneto-optical, data is read with a laser. It's simple, and works like a CD. Data is written, however, by first heating the media with a different laser to a near melting point, and then altering the 1's and 0's with a magnetic head. When the material cools, the bits aren't easily altered by magnetic force. (It would take so much magnetic force that the whole media would be severely bent anyway.) This results in extremely good reliability, but not so good write speeds. Nevertheless, writing is faster than a floppy, and many people put up with that. Notably, reading is very quick.
As for the economics, both ATAPI and SCSI drives are available. The least expensive models these days are the Fujitsu DynaMO's. Media is not very cheap, but would get much cheaper if more people used the technology and economies of scale kicked in.
Additionally, the drives are all backwardly compatible, from 640MB to 230MB to 128MB.
In short, if you are planning a solution for an entire campus of people, MO might not be the best solution, just because ZIP and CDRW are so cheap. But, if you're looking for a personal data solution, or need proven reliability, MO is the way to go.
I am not a lawyer.
I use my webmail to email stuff when I am at the computer lab, or if it is big I just use my webspace to up/download. works pretty good, I don't like floppies anymore, compact flash memory drives at school would be cool, I would use it.
http://www.ariseweb.com - For the geek in all of us.
UN*Xes are designed for this. I never see anybody using removable media on the Sparcs in the Comp. Sci. lab here. The windows machines in the same lab, however, have no NFS mounts. You can't store anything locally, so unreliable removable media is forced by default.
Offer more centralized storage solutions and make sure the students know about them, then they'll get rid of the floppies.
I have a mini disc player that I bought in Japan. I think it is great. It records fast, erases fast, is quite durable and hold as much (and sometimes more) than a CD-ROM. I hate floppy disks and if someone would replace them with something like the mini disc I would be very happy.
The problem is not the reliability of the floppy, but the fact that students always abuse the media. The percentage of students who attempt to go through a four year COMPUTER SCIENCE program on ONE floppy disk (for all courses) in mind boggling. Head wear on floppy disks gives them a very finite life. I spend my first lecture (data structures in C++) on the need to rotate five new floppy disks, and the necessity of storing all important work on at least three of these disks. Five new floppy disks are listed as a course requirement in my sylabus. It is hopeless, not one student in 10 will heed the warning. No matter what media you use, the problem will continue. This is one lesson that can only be learned by going through an absolute disaster. Sad but true.
Actually, using anything with straight LZW compression, like PKZIP, is a bad idea. The compression algorithm is such that any error partway through the compressed file renders the remainder of it completely unrecoverable. PKZIPFIX, which "recovers" a damaged archive, in fact only recovers that portion of the archive before the error.
A far better solution is to use ARJ. The latest versions include a switch, -hk, for making a separate redundancy file. The type of redundancy used is sector-based, making it particularly suited to typical disk problems like bad sectors, cross links, and virus damage. Unlike PKZIP, ARJ can recover files that occur after an error in the archive. Archives that span multiple disks are treated as separate archives, so if it turns out disk 1 of 200 was completely unreadable, at least you can recover the other 199 sections. I don't believe this is possible with PKZIP.
Regards,
I am also allergic to floppy disks. One option is simply to establish a web e-mail account, something like MyNameStorage@InsertHotMailEquivalent.com, and just e-mail yourself any docs you need easy access to. Alternatively you can use one of the web backup services. I find e-mail simpler because everyone does e-mail. Few university computers have no web access and few home computers are modem-less.
Just buy a pile of internal ZIP drives, they are cheap, common, and reliable "enough". They meet your under $40 criteria.
If you think flash memory is a cheap alternative because the readers are cheap, you are ignoring the cost of media.
If you are thinking longer term, internal CDRW drives can be had for around $100. Consider that the media is less then $2 per GB (ZIP is around $50 per GB, Flash is around $1500 per GB).
Or take that $40 per computer and buy a couple tons of floppy disks, offer them free.... Or sell them below cost, say 10 cents each.
Actually, using anything with straight LZW compression, like PKZIP, is a bad idea.
The .zip and .tgz formats use Deflate (LZSS + Huffman), not LZW. If the .zip format used LZW (it did in PKZIP's early years), then Unisys would be all over the Info-ZIP project.
Now, to "LZ-type algorithms are a bad idea on floppies because errors are not recoverable": I'll give you that one.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The problem would be solved if you could educate students. Backups are the way to go, whatever the media is. However, as some people pointed out, this is nearly impossible to MAKE students do something.
:)
:)
So, maybe you could try something like this:
one week before they have to give this huge project. Backup all there homedirs, and erase them all. Then, send email to explain that you are terribly sorry, but everything has been lost due to a power outage and a fire and a flood and whatever.
Way one day or two (just before the major riot in the school) and give everything back, with a little sermon on backups
And don't be a BOFH, be careful to actually BACKUP everything, else...
The latest figures are in the region of 10.8 TB for a device of that size - more than four times the original value.
According to Mike Downey, head of Cavendish Management Resource, which is handling the commercial issues associated with the technology, the research also applies to DVD style storage media, "That figure has also been revised upwards: to 245GB on a single sided device," he said.
So soon you will be able to carry the library of congress on a pc card.
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
Any kind of flash with a floppy disk adapter is very handy, albeit expensive.
But seriously...
I cannot believe that so many people keep things *solely* on floppies!
This only happens in universities.... all students should have an appropriate amount of reliable storage on the campus network, and have those same files available over the internet.
*ROFLMAO*
As if it weren't already obvious this were a troll ;)
Imation disks are right up there with TDK and Fuji disks in the "garbage disks you should never ever buy" list.
:)
I've taken a brand new box of Imation disks, obtained from various sources both mail order and locally, attempted to re-format them on two different machines in my office, and every single time had at least 2 format with bad sectors (which then got dumped in the garbage), and at least one that was simply not able to be formatted. Nice.
And, before we get into the old floppy drive / dirty floppy drive / radiation / magnetic field arguements, the two machines are able to format a decent floppy fine, both floppy drives are "name brand", one a Mitsumi and the other a Teac, and one is just barely 6 months old right now. The drives (and PC's) are incredibly clean internally, with fewer dust-bunnies accumulating in them in 3 years than most PC's collect in 3 weeks, and are kept up on the desk off of the floor. And electromagnetic radiation realistically couldn't be lower, it's a very rural setting, in a metal building, vith little in the way of strong magnetic or EMI sources nearby. Cell phones? Umm, no, cell phones go out of service inside the building, so no one brings them in with them
Short and the long of it is, floppies are generally garbage and not to be trusted. It used to be that Sony and Verbatim floppies were pretty good, but I simply won't use floppies anymore. They only time I run into the need is the odd install disk or boot floppy, that's about it. Otherwise I move files about via Compact Flash card, which works great in my notebook, and with a CF reader bay in my PC. Alternately I move files via CDRW if it's a large amount of data.
Keep your hard disks at least mirrored (RAID, the only way to fly), backed up on tape (and kept cool, dry, away from magnetic fields, and in a certified media safe), and even occasionally backup data / source files (most people don't care about actual application backups, they can be re-installed / compiled) to a CDR. I keep my monthly CDR backups in a bank safe deposit box.
OK, now that I've gotten sufficiently off topic, I've seen USB Flask disk dongles available as of late, and if your labs are running Windows (which unfortunately they probably are), they should work quite well. Although Linux support for USB has made quantum leaps in the last 12 months, I couldn't speak as to wether or not these dongles would work there. You'd probably want to check with Matt Dharm on the Linux-USB list at SourceForge.
Yes, they're expensive, but they exceed your 8MB of desired storage capacity. Not the cheapest place to get them, but Cyberguys has a 16MB and 32MB version available.
16MB, $69.95 USD - Here
32MB, $129.00 USD - Here
Note that these units are claimed to be "100% USB Spec. 1.1 compatible", so they should be Linux compatible, but I'd still check with the Linux USB gurus.
Brad
I also work at a college and face problem of students(and faculty) losing stuff on floppies. My standard response is to send them to a free internet storage site. The files would then be available anywhere/any time. I recommend any of the following sites:
X-Drive
Student Drive
I-Drive
Driveway
For more on the IOmega Click of Death problem, check out the TIP (Trouble In Paradise) section of Steve Gibson's web site
At my University they installed zip 100 drives in every computer. It is working great. But there is one problem zip 250 some students and faculty have a Zip 250 and they can not use it in the older drives. Other than that I would say this has help everyone alot.
My school uses a network drive availabe on all the computers at the school and through FTP. We have a 15 meg limit. That would be a sloution, though might be more expensive then you are looking for. Another solution could be IOMEGA superdisk drives. the discs cost arround $15 and are magno-optical so they are durriable they can also read normal 3.5 dics.
Adam Sane sanity is a dirty job, but somebody has to do it.
I know plenty of students that buy Zip discs so they can download large files on the schools T1 connection and then take them home. Buying a zip disc, while it may not be anymore reliable than a floppy, is cheaper than paying for DSL or a Cable modem connection every month. I'm sure this can be applied to CD RW as well. I agree that using an easily accesible network is probably the best choice, but don't think that college kids are too cheap to buy something if they can find another good use for it.
CD-ROM drives with the MULTI-READ designation can read stamped CD, CD-R, and CD-RW.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Not sure, but I think Iomega gets royalty money for every ZIP drive sold by other manufacturers.
I am not a lawyer.
This reminds me of a friend of mine. Always laughing at me because I spend $1/floppy disk when he can get 3 for that price. And always telling me how unreliable floppies are, when I have had almost no problems. ;)
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
A quibble. It's 5.25" and 3.5", respectively. Your point is a good one. Let's face it, the tracks on the old 5.25" diskettes were wider than those on the 3.5" diskettes. After all, bigger media size, less data, and same basic material. It just makes sense that the 5.25" diskettes were more reliable.
I am not a lawyer.
Ok, I Haven't finished reading all the comments here, but so far i don't see this mentioned..
I Remember seeing in a catalog for TigerDirect.com a USB 4M Flash Type Disk, Really small, just plugs into any usb port and is usuable.. IIRC The price was around 30$ or so for each.. each student would need only one and the cost would be low because there would be no drive to purchase. (they also offer other ones with more storage space) but this would solve the problem with disks going bad and everything.
Kenny
Total cost of media (3 disks) is 30 cents?!? I made another post on here about economics vs. quality, and said the cheap disks are 3/$1 and the good disks are 1/$1. You appear to be able to get disks for 10/$1. I shudder to think how poor quality those disks are...
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
60G hard disk ($300): .5 cents/M
10G extern. USB ($155): 1.5 cents/M
1.44M floppy: ($.10): 7 cents/M
64M flash: ($150): 234 cents/M
The USB external hard disks seems like the big
win to me, for moving stuff around!
I hope I'm not trolling here, but has anyone pointed out some of the services like IDrive, XDrive, or one of the other web-based storage solutions. I work for a major university that has their own IDrive site that is administered and backed up by IDrive and it is absolutely wonderful! If you're a totally Windows shop, XDrive is good because you can install their software and the student/faculty/staff's remote storage will be mapped as the X: Drive on the system. The best thing about this... no media to carry around, you don't have to worry about backups (like with network storage you host), and everyone can access it from any computer including their home computers.
I've only seen one person post about it: Magneto-Optical (often abbreviated as "MO"). It's a genuinely *reliable* removable media system.
.co m/support/storage/faqs/mo.html has some MO FAQs (though I wouldn't recommend a Sony drive).
Zip, Jaz, etc. are all crap. And Iomega sucks anyway -- their support stinks, their product quality stinks, and they'd rather spend money advertising their products than building quality into them.
http://www.ita.sel.sony
The downside is that MO drives tend to be expensive, though the media is quite inexpensive. Unfortunately, they don't have much popularity in the US -- they have much greater popularity in Europe and Japan. Fortunately, the media formats are ISO standard.
Probably the best consumer-level choice for MO drives in the US is Fujitsu, but MaxOptix makes good drives in the larger, 5.25" sizes.
Anyway, do yourself a favor and at least consider MO.
(A very satisfied MO user for 5+ years).
I'm certain that floppy quality has decreased. I've got some 8-year-old Windows 3.1 disks in my cabinet which I just used yesterday to fix a computer. And they've experienced speaker magnets, monitor radiation, extreme heat, everything. A few years back I received a SVGA drivers disk from Microsoft when I was having technical problems, and it had been stepped on. It still worked. But any disk purchased within the last three years or so just can't compete. It's quite pathetic.
Aciel
aciel@speakeasy.net
--
The shareholder is always right.
What I have noticed is that Imation floppy disks, which are the ones commonly available in places like Wal-mart, are of such low quality that at least one or two disks out of a pack of ten fail on the first use. The others usually follow quickly. I don't remember 3M (what Imation used to call itself) making such crappy diskettes, but I know the ones I've bought with an Imation label in the last couple of years have been of very poor quality.
Something to note about these Imation diskettes. If you have one, get it out, hold it up, and try to slip your fingernail between the halves. Yeah, you see the seam where the two halves are joined together - see if you can stick your fingernail in between them. Interesting, isn't it? The casing halves are only stuck together at the corners. Now consider what the inevitable amount of flexing that these diskettes undergo will do. Yeah, that's right, that little seam is going to flex open fairly often, allowing all sorts of !@#$#% crud to encounter the delicate magnetic media inside. Nice design. No telling what other sort of cost-cutting measures have been implemented that are less obvious to a casual appraisal.
Now floppy disks have admittedly become so inexpensive that users may not be so irate in terms of money wasted when a disk dies, but I think we'd all agree that it hasn't got any less irksome when a disk dies and we lose an important document or program.
More expensive brands of diskettes actually have the seams fused together. I think it's a worthwhile investment.
zeke
I read someting somewhere about a drive in dev putting 30-40mb on a standard floppy?.
Well I'm no expert in Magnetic storage but I'll tell you the average 3.5"" floppy won't successfully take a 1.72 meg low level format after a couple of months on the shelf. If you ever tried getting TOMSRTBT on a floppy you know what I'm talking about.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
Well, I just bought a new removable media drive a couple days ago called the "Orb" and it rocks...It beats the hell out of ZIP drives left and right. Check it out:
* 2.2GB storage
* Much faster than ZIP...like an older HDD
* Cost: ~$169
*** 2.2 GB Cartridge cost: ONLY ~$20!!!!!!
* int EIDE, int/ext SCSI, ext USB
And, as if that weren't enough...here's the REAL gem: The external USB drive is ACTUALLY the external SCSI drive, but with a SCSI-to-USB adapter, so you can plug it in to your SCSI adapter at home for SPEED, but still take it anywhere and use it through USB! KICKS ASS!
Check it out:
http://www.castlewood.comThere is also a good review at www.tomshardware.com
-Brandon
Just upload it to an xdrive account (or one of the many other free hardrives on the internet). You get around 20 or 30 megs of free space (up to 100 in some cases) and can access it from any computer with an internet connection. They also have a tool (for windows) you can download that will make your xdrive appear as a hard drive in 'my computer' to make it even easier to copy files back and forth to the xdrive with simple drag and drop.
I've been using my xdrive for a while now and it makes it very easy to copy files back and forth from school/work/home and friends. Since I'm using a unique password for it, I don't mind just telling my friends to upload the files they want to send me to my xdrive account and to get files that I want to send them from there. I can also choose to share certain files so other people (whom I wouldn't trust with my password) can download them my simply e-mailing them a link to the file.
In general I just think it's a very good service and is a very good substitute for floppy disks for data transfer or even long term storage.
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
7 cents/M is a lot better then then the $2.34.
Although I agree wholeheartedly with this idea. I'd love to have some form of high-speed, high-reliability random access rewritable media for the road.
Especially seeing as these things are being used more and more often in Digital Cameras and PDAs. But for the purpose of transporting documents, I think it's a little overkill and pricey to boot.
Actually it is 1970. And it was invented by James T. Russell. But you are right, the CD wasn't even slightly popular until the late 80's.
A few handy quotes:
Now that has to be the most interesting thing I've found today... I had always thought Philips/Magnavox and Sony invented the CD. But no, it wasn't even a company after all.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Here at Clemson, instead of forcing students to carry media around, each user is allocated 50 megs of space on a share drive. You can place your term papers, binaries, whatever, into your share drive from your dorm room or lab, and then access them from any lab or computer on campus. It's very convenient, and prevents damage to files. Since you must log in with your userid, others cannot steal your work. Just a thought.
-
I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.
LS120 (SuperDisk) drives.- ---------
120mb in their current incarnation, IDE read/write speed, backward compatible with floppy disks, etc.
They're also a digital format, so that the data is a bit more secure than floppies (although they're no substitute for regular network back-ups).
-------------------------------------
+++++++
"Look, dear, it's a crazy hairy scary man!"
I know I'll be taken to the woodshed and shot for saying this, but what about Iomega's Clik drives. I think they hold 40MB and are fairly inexpensive. Don't know anything else and have never used one.
Since some suggested the network then the next thing would be one of those free space internet websites like X:drive or E:drive. I am assuming that the uni has a good I-net connection.
/-\ |-|
and neither me nor my friends have had any problems. I've been using Zip disks for about 4 years, and love 'em. They're reasonable fast, relatively cheap, and what has happened at school since every non-Solaris box has one is that everyone carries one around. There are people who have had the same disc for all three years of school! Its a widely available format, and 100 megs is more then enough for any student. Reliability is not an issue. The university, BTW, is U of Manitoba, and widespread Zip use has worked for them. They do, of course, still have floppy drives.
-MR
-Michael Roy Some people are like Slinkies. Not really useful, but you can't help smiling when you see one tumble down
For example, consider a 100M Zip vs. an 8M mem stick. Say that through some act of God they both have identical prices and reliability. Now, suppose the zip dies. That is a potentially more catastrophic thing than the memory stick dying as more data is able to be stored on said disk. In such a scenario, the student who uses one Zip disk has lost all his/her homework, whereas the student who's used 4 or 5 memory sticks is only slightly SOL if one dies.
My point is that in terms of a viable solution, one needs to consider two things:
- Students won't make duplicates. They will fill to capacity before pulling out another disk.
- Media is going to die at some point, whether through mfg. error or accident.
So, making your solution be smaller capacity rather than larger is actually more a service to the students than going with something like a Jazz drive.Just something to think about.
- Jonathan
I work at UCLA's main computer lab. Whenever I have a user come up to me with a bad disk, this happens everyday. I explain and show them, with great detail mind you, how to ftp to their own personal space, every UCLA student has one, and I show them how to send their file as an attachment. If they are too stubborn to learn how to use what I taught them then they deserve to lose their files the next time around.
At my university, University at Buffalo, all students get 15mb of space (which they like to call UBFS or UB File System or something) that can be easily accessed from any workstation. When you log into an NT workstation the space is mapped to your S: drive. In UNIX you can just cd to $UBFSHOME and get there as well. I know he said the have space on several servers but perhaps they should set it up in a similar way, having it set as a networked drive on NT so the average PC user will have no problem.
Take out all of the floppy drives on University computers, the have all the students use some form of file sharing.
I have 3 Zip drives. An external SCSI drive I've had for 4 years, an external Parallel Port drive for 2 years, and an internal ATAPI drive that I've also had for about 2 years. Never had a problem with any of them until about 3 months ago when the internal ATAPI Zip drive started making strange noises and acting erratically. After some searching I found out about the "Click of Death" here .
It is a real phenomenon.
When my system began to exhibit the symptoms I called my vendor's support line since it was still within the warranty period and they dispatched a tech to replace the drive within a couple of days. The tech confirmed for me that Zip drives are a major headache for them. They tend to fail on a regular basis.
Do you work for Iomega? You are spreading untrue claims in your message. The problem is NOT with the early models of the Zip drive. The problem is more likely to occur in NEWER models of the drive. Iomega has serious quality control problems and the problem started happening when they started to cut corners in manufatcturing. While it is true that you can damage a drive by dropping it, that is simply NOT the major cause of the problem although Iomega would have you believe otherwise. Do you think I dropped my internal ATAPI drive?
I urge everyone who has a similar problem to check out the Click of Death site for more information. Busted up disks CAN spread the problem between drives, but this is not really the underlying cause of most of the problems.
There have been class action lawsuits filed against Iomega regarding their Zip drive product. Their senior executives were finally forced to admit they had a serious problem. Sending people to their web site without pointing out the alternative explanation is a disservice.
However, I've got what I'd like to call a miracle.
I have an AOL 3.0 floppy from back in '96 that has worked flawlessly, under fairly regular use, since then. On top of that, the disk's protective door no longer exists, and hasn't since about '97. I highly esteem this floppy - it seems to have been blessed by the Gods of Data Integrity, and is thus highly valued.
As of recently, I've had sooo many problems with floppies - you know the type that they sell at KMart in bundles of 20 for 10$ with a 9$ mail in rebate. Maybe 1 out of 4 has a problem with it. Thank goodness for networking.
-------
CAIMLAS
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I'm also on a relatively small college campus, and not having a printer has presented me with the problem of somehow getting papers to the lab so I can print them. At first I did use floppies, but it only took about two or so attempts where I lost all information due to the horrible nature of public lab floppy drives to realize I needed something else.
Fortunately, so did the rest of the campus. They set up a series of network folders-- each student got one when they entered that could be accessible by password from any campus computer. When I want to print something out, I save to my folder, go to lab at my convenience, open from my folder and print away. With a campus of 5000 students, giving them as much space as a floppy, you only have about 7500mb to add on, which keeps cost low, and system maintenance is easy because you only have to watch one drive (I would assume-- I didn't set the system up myself).
Floppies are dead.. Long live networking!
I find SmartMedia ideal: it's small, light, slightly flexible, and you can wipe the connectors clean if they get dirty. It's also manufactured by many companies and there are many readers for it, including a number of USB readers.
The MemoryStick is an OK design as well. Unfortunately, it's much less widely supported. One consequence is that you may have a harder time finding a reader that works for you.
Set it up such that whenever a logged in student saves a file to disk, it also saves a copy in thier home directory. If a disk gets currupted, there will always be a copy on the server for retrieval.
This might raise a privacy issue as a student might not wish everything they save to disk to be copied to the server. Make sure each student is aware of this, and explain to them why it is a Good Idea to save his/her files to the server, and let them disable this behavior if they so choose.
If you choose alternative media types such as flash RAM not only will the schools have to install new drives, but so will the students which isn't really practical. This idea might be a bit more practical and hopefully save you a bunch of headaches.
-If something doesn't work, hit it. If it continues to not work, hit it again. That should do the trick.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
I work there, so I'm biased, but I think the best alternative to floppy backups is the snapshot feature built into the filesystem on the filers we make at Network Appliance. The filesystem periodically saves its state so that you can retrieve old versions of your files simply by peering into the special ".snapshot" directory (called "~snapshot" if you're using Windows CIFS network drives instead of Unix NFS.) So if you accidentally mung a file, you can just fetch it out of one of the hourly or nightly snapshots. You wouldn't believe how many times this has saved our asses in engineering. :-)
Read the filesystem design paper to find out how it works.
Sure, it works to allocate space on file servers for individual students. This is the practice at the local university and certainly elsewhere; suitably enlightened students who live at home can also FTP into their directory. However, I'm still in high school, most of the school runs on Bondi iMacs and largely antiquarian HP Vectras (before all you post-high-schoolers bitch about poor cable/DSL choices at home, think of life on a T1 shared across a *district* with some goddamned N2H2 monitoring software on the proxy and FullControl on the individual boxen... pain and agony, indeed), and we have maybe three staff members who don't run away screaming when presented with some network error. Nope, and we can't FTP or telnet into the school servers anyway, even for those classes in which accounts are set up. To take any work home, you have one option: the floppy drive. 1.44 megs is sufficient for, say, a couple Word files or a single workspace in VC++. Nothing more. (Don't ask about emailing work home. We've tried.) However, floppies are dirt cheap. They go for a quarter at school, ten cents if they're used, free if you have your own. CDRWs are comparably cheap, and useful on iCracks, though much more of a pain to use at school, and 650 megs is certainly overkill on a medium I can't even write to at school. Another factor is cost. Floppy and CDRW are cheap, but limited in their respective ways. Zip is just about perfect in terms of size, as a small, portable medium. However, I consider it a relative failure as a format - I can't call a format portable and sharable that costs $10 a pop. I'll happily give a friend a floppy or CDRW, but I don't even trust myself with a ten-dollar disk. Notwithstanding the iCrack's shameless lack of an internal drive, I'm betting floppy will remain in use for a while. It's not great, but functional, and more durable in the grubby little paws of idiot students (something CDRW sorely lacks.) I WOULD like a 50-meg floppy medium that costs less than $2 a disk. Is this feasible with current drives? Backwards compatibility with existing 3.25" drives is the idea here, seeing how the support for compatibility in many public schools is indeed backward... eh. So. Cheap, high-capacity floppy disks would be nothing short of a blessing.
This isn't a technical problem, it's a human problem. Students can destroy or lose any removable media; you don't hear about the lost floppies, because they don't come to you about it, but it's as much of a problem. And while they can't screw up a fileserver, and thus network storage is a better solution than removable media, they can still accidentally overwrite or delete stuff.
:-)
The only answer is better education. It's not perfect; there's only so much you can do to protect users from themselves; but it'll reduce the damage, and, well, education ought to be worth something in a university setting.
When I worked in a university computer lab, I took some of the long-abandoned or hopelessly corrupted floppies that were lying in the drawers, broke and cut and folded and burned them, and made posters using them. "THIS WAS SOMEONE'S SENIOR THESIS. (insert mutilated disk) MAKE BACKUPS." I put them up all over the lab. They certainly drew attention, and I think they may have driven the message (you do not want to lose your work to unreliable media) into people's heads.
Like many others, I have found floppy disks to be extremely unreliable. They seem to have become even more unreliable in recent years. (The 5.25s I have from 10 years ago have much less corruption than the the 3.5s from 5 years ago.)
My solution - a decent file server and a cheap CDR. MacOS 8.0 and higher, as well as Win95 and higher make it very easy to run a file server on your desktop pc. I run a private server on my computer, for which only I have the password. If I need to access or save a file, anywhere in the world connected to the internet, I can do this. If someone else needs a file, I can create a directory on the server for the file, and give the person access to that directory.
Once a week, I use a CDR drive to make a backup of all the important documents. The cost of this is very low ($120 for the drive, $0.20 per disc.) If someone needs something on a floppy disc, virtually all the time, they have a CDROM drive anyway, so I just burn them a disc. Much more reliable than floppies, and much more data, too.
ummmm remember napster, guys? Do you REALLY want to put a CD... AUDIO CD... recorder on every workstation on campus? It'd be fun for the students, sure, but there would be precious little HOMEWORK stored on them.
Do unto others as you can talk them into doing unto you....
There must be a shortage of floppy disks. I used to get free ones in the mail every week. Now all I get is these weird looking coasters.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
Forget removable.
It costs money, so students won't use it. And none of the solutions are compatable with each other. Some will have floppies, others not. Some will have Zip, SuperDrive, CD-RW, etc. You can't cover all of them.
But everyone will have basic internet access. With 20,000 students (the same as the university I work for) give iDrive or one of the other services a call and ask them what it would cost for accounts for all of your students, faculty, staff.
It's less than you might think, and 50MB of storage, always available, with guest access is perfect for a student. No losing a disk between the lab and the dorm, no corruption, nearly total compatability, and multiple people can access simultaneously - it can even stream MP3s.
We have iDrive accounts for everyone through a custom portal for our campus. Accounts are automatically created and authenticated using the persons campus account info. The account names are easy to remember since they are the same as a persons email address without the host. It's by far the best solution I've seen.
Before discussing what type of removable media should be used, one should think about if removable media is actually necessary.
I can think of the following reasons that students want to put files on removable media:
1. They want to take it to a computer off the network
2. They want to make a back up copy of it
3. They want to give it to someone else who is not on the network.
I'm going to make the assumption that students can have their own computers on the network and have full access to their files on shared servers.
I would argue that removable media is not necessary on school-owned computers. This includes floppy drives, CD-RWS, zip, etc. What is really needed is a well set up file serving system that would make up for all the needs stated above. The file server must be accessible by anyone on the network, and be as fast as possible (not overloaded and on a 100 Mbit network). If all of the student's computers are on the network, and they learned how to access their files from the network, they would not need to transfer them by another means as much. If away from the school, an FTP interface could allow students access to their data from anywhere on the internet - with cable modems becoming more mainstream for home users, even large files could be downloaded with ease (provided the university has an adequate internet connection).
The file servers should be completely backed up, which will probably be quite costly, but necessary. All students should have a disk quota so that no one is downloading gigs of whatever on to the file server. This way there would be little chance of file loss, but if a student was still concerned they could put a copy on their local hard drive of their own computer.
If a student wants to give data to someone else on campus, they could e-mail it to them provided it was not too large. If they actually did want the data on removable media, they could use their own computer and whatever media they wanted. This of course assumes they have one, but usually one of two roommates in a dorm now do, so I don't think it's much of a problem. Let the students bear the cost of the media and drives (not to mention the risk of data loss) if they want to use outdated removable media - not your problem.
Sorry this was so long-winded, but in summary all file access is quite possible from file servers and no removable media is necessary.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
..and sell the service as well. The students can retrieve their data and the school will make a killing!
_Bleh!_
Beisdes, I can BOOT from floppy on any PC. Can't say the same for Zip drives.
I won't argue with you on the proprietarity of the ZIP system but they are still quite popular and widespread.
Your comment on the booting is complete nonsense. You can't boot a floppy on my system because I have that option disabled. You can boot most ATAPI sources on modern computers though, and that would include ZIP disks. In fact, there is a Slackware distribution which fits on a single ZIP disk. I haven't checked into it but IIRC it is bootable.
The click of death is a problem. I have never had it happen on any of a dozen ZIP100 drives (parallel, IDE and SCSI) I've used over the past 2 years, and they receive HEAVY use with dozens of disks each.
The media itself is very rugged. I've dropped them off a desk on to a concrete floor without a problem many times. The drives are NOT quite that rugged. :-) Jaz media can't be dropped more than 1" or you will damage them.
I would reccomend CF or Click drives myself; both have larger capacity than floppies and are rugged as hell.
I use MySpace and a SuperDisk.
The pros of MySpace is that uploading/downloading
multiple files and convenient file manipulation is possible.
The cons of MySpace is that you need to be connectec to the net.
My second solution is a SuperDisk. I think it's more reliable than 1.44 floppy disk and it can read floppy disks.
Or.. if you need a lot more space, how about MO drive? As far as I know Fuji made one which is inexpensive.
I personally don't like CD-RW, because it's not readable on all CD drives, and writing takes long time.
The only way out of this problem in my experience is to remove all the floppy drives from the computers and let users login to their accounts via NFS/NIS or similar technology. If you try going with something non-standard people will bitch and you'll still have various issues. As long as your school offers a way to connect home computers and laptops to the network so that the files are instantly available you shouldn't have any problems. I've seen so many students loose term papers and other critical documents due to floppy disks and shaving on lab computer hdd's. The school officially didn't support restoring these files so unless one of us geeks felt like bending the rules the students were just out of luck. Depending on what happened it can take hours to restore the files. A major pain. :)
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
"We offer our students space on several file servers"
Nuff said.
Have one machine in each room with a floppy drive. Have no applications on it at all so people can only use it to copy files.
Remove all the floppy drives and hide them somewhere. Take them to a "trash and treasure" stall and use the proceeds to buy a Zip drive for each floppy machine.
Did you know it took me over a year to realise my Sparc5 didn't have a floppy drive?
X.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
What I'm presuming is that these storage servers have not been web-enabled.
Seastead this.
You also get lots of free storage space by creating free web pages at www.tripod.com, www.geocities.com, etc.
Of course, the downside to this is that you can only access stuff when your Internet connection is up. But the fact that I can access this stuff from practically anywhere is a big plus, even if my computer blows up, my house burns down, or whatever.
I'd suggest using PGP or GnuPG to encrypt any sensitive data you upload to sites such as these. Trust no one.
How about at least educating students about using the network to save files to say X-drive or any of those many companies that are using VC money to build large server farms and raid arrays? I hold no specific interest in any of those companies but as long as your school's computers have browsers and are on the net- why not see if students use that instead? I'd have to assume that their dorm/home computers are on the net as well... Gen
As an employee in charge of maintaining the labs at the University of Memphis, I realize how horribly unsafe keeping your data on a floppy is. The majority of our intelligent students buy at least on Zip disk and back it up to their hard drive at home at least once a week.
Side note: You know, I'm sad that the LS120 never really caught on... It's 120MB, and the drives are backwards compatible with a regular 1.44 floppy. I guess Iomega had control over so much of the market that the inferior product won (remind you of any other company?)
Most students have a shell account. I work in a lab at U of I where I tell students not to use disks, but instead ftp their document or whatever it is to their respective accounts. I can't tell you how many times I've seen the dejected face of a student who just lost his paper because of a faulty disk. All alternative forms of storage can be lost or damaged, regardless of what they are. dumb dumb dumb
I back up all my important documents on the web, for free when ever i need to. At a university there is no shortage of web access, im sure it wouldnt be hard for users to lern how to do this... Simply, Obtain free email from Yahoo or Hotmail or any of the other big (aka usually reliable) web email systems... Then when your ready to log off, fire up the web browser and email the file to yourself (as in the web based email addy). Now your file is accessable world wide... Simple, Cheap, and universal. Requiring only internet access... (an even better one would be where you would forward the documents to multiple redundant web based email)
I keep getting bad 3.5" disks in brand new boxes of blank disks. The box says the disks have a lifetime warranty, the only problem is that they don't give an address where the bad disks can be sent. The last box of disks that I opened, Sony Brand, had two disks that would not even format.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Follow Apple's lead. They know that floppy disks are essentially useless today. Operating systems can be booted and installed from CD-ROM. It's not very difficult to make a bootable CD either.
Besides, would you trust your important data to a 10 cent piece of plastic? Most people's data is more important than that.
My recommendation:
1. Stop supporting floppy diskettes. Don't even attempt to fix a bad floppy disk and don't hand any out.
2. See if you can order computers without floppy drives.
3. When people ask you what they are supposed to do without their floppy, explain first why you don't support them (unreliable, small capacity) and then suggest alternatives -- Zip, CD-RW, or the best one... the network!!!
Ouch! The truth hurts!
If anyone wants to assist, or already has done so, let me know.
cya, Andrew...
This is my sig, exciting huh!
Perhaps 'Show all files' wasn't checked in your Win95 folder options?
Using some applied thermodynamics (being an engineer) I found that putting the floppy in a small sealed plasticbag solved the problem. Easy and cheap.
... Having matured, I now use FTP and CVS =)
Eih bennek, eih blavek
I personally stopped using the floppy disk as soon as I got some webspace. Now I just upload my homework using ftp to my webspace and download it at school and then if I modify it at school I upload to my webspace again. This way it's cheap and accessible from everywhere. You could either use that or use one of the disk space sites online, like XDrive or FreeDiskSpace (http://www.freediskspace.com) There's less chances of errors and you don't have to worry about breaking the thing if you sit down.
The first is that they are the cheapest means of storing a small quantity of data. Ideal for say turning in programs to a professor and the like.
While many would reccomend email for such endeavors, it is impractical. Imagine a large university class of 200 or so coding in Visual C++ or Visual Basic. Associated source, dll, and executable files could easily mostly fill a floppy (I know, I've had to do it).
200 or more students each sending the professor ~1mb email all at the same time is going to cause all sorts of fun problems, particularly if he/she is using a departmental mail server (often the case when dealing with VB teachers).
Zips are nicer, and more stable, but if I loose a $0.50 floppy, I don't really care. If I loose a $10.00 zip I'm going to be a little upset.
I just realizet that my old c64 floppies (5.25") are still good, and I have fewer problems with them than with brand new floppies running on brand new drives. Perhaps companies are putting less quality into floppies than before.
CD-RW's are nice, but tend to need slightly different treatment both in use, and in storage/transport. Concepts often beyond many of those who frequent university computer labs.
They are also more expensive. Not by a lot, and they're much cheaper considering the amount of space, but the downsides outweigh the upsides for the uninitiated.
The other main use of floppies are for booting machines. They're cheap, and effective. If a machine must be booted, a floppy drive can be procured for under $20.00, and something minimal can be done. Other solutions are more difficult.
The best solution is education. (It should be noted that most users will resist to the death all such education attempts however).
Users should use zip disks for most transport, saving things on servers when necessary, and only saving that which they really need at that.
Most of the problems I see involve people wanting to save every cute little attachment their friends send them. These usually go on the servers, rather than onto the zips or floppies.
The the correct action is to put things you really want to save on cd-rw's or zips, If zips, something more permanant such as a cd-R would be a good idea.
Zips are not only good mass storage, but can store various utilities that are not present on the university machines, such as print formatters, or other such free utilities. (We all know that this would break the eula of most pay software).
As users tend to resist education, it needs to be pointed out to them that they are responsible for loosing data.
Show them the correct way to guard against data loss. Point out how long it's been since you lost data. Tell them about how the servers usually are backed up regularly, and how things are not usually lost.
Some of these things may make them feel bad, or ever make them mad. So what? They need to know it, and if they don't have it put to them in very simple terms, they will fail to understand.
The thing to remember is that while most users aren't stupid, most do have a fear of the computer that makes them so.
I have seen people on the verge of hysterics over having to use a computer. One man (who had other psychological and medical problems too) was so frightened that he would get an error that he was actually unable to move.
Another individual pulled a multi-page paper off of a dot-matrix printer (ca 1992) looked at it, and screamed "IT PRINTED IT UPSIDE DOWN!" I had to physically restrain him long enough to show him that he had the paper upside down. (He was printing up a major portion of his masters thesis due in a few minutes).
Neither was stupid, but the fear of the computer made them loose their wits, and they did stupid things. Most users will have similar problems, although to a lesser degree. If things are not very simple, and straightforeward, they won't understand, not because they can't but because they believe that they can't.
The greatest problems will come when people are under stress. Many people will resist education until five minutes before a paper is due, the only copy of which is on a corrupt floppy. They will consider it to be YOUR fault that the floppy died.
Hopefully they'll learn that a single copy of anything is not to be trusted, but many won't. I've seen people loose papers four and five times, and not learn to make multiple backups.
Disabling the floppy drives is one solution, but I think a bad one. There are times that someone may need to copy something to a floppy. There are times you may need to boot off a floppy (we use ghost servers to restore machines to a default configuration, a boot floppy is used in a reboot once with floppy type setup).
The best answer is that expierence will teach eventually. It just may take time, and you'll have to take some abuse in the mean time. That is the primary duty of tech support after all, to take abuse when computers can't save people from themselves.
There is a civil war coming in the United States. Remember which side has most of the guns
Use WebDav, or an equivilent. Provide between 10 and 20 MB standard, and more on request of student (charge student), department (charge to dept., if dept. account), or staff (including faculty). The data centre would be responsible for backups and archiving. The registrars office would be responsible for notifying the data center when a student is leaving. The same goes for a faculty or staff member. When they quit or are terminated, HR informs the data center to close the account. No reason has to be given by either department, just that so and so is leaving, or has left effective on a certain date. Provide rapid access to those persons files after leave, say 2 to 3 months. During this time, write access should be denied, but read and delete access should be granted. If you keep monthly archives, you could extend this period, just make sure they know they have contact the data center to have the data restored, and that they'll have a limited time (7-14 days) to retrieve it. This won't solve your problems, but it may give you some ideas.
You can use disk quota to limit the amount of disk space people can use to say 10 MB so you don't have to get funding for enourmous amounts of disks.
Access from outside campus can be limited to ftp and/or http so people can read and write their files from anywhere in the World.
This is the file sharing solution with the lowest demand on sysadm resources both with regard to maintenance and security.
Tiny little postage stamp sized flash cards that are used in some MP3 players and digital cameras. They can be from 8 - 64Mb. The interface to the card is a serial interface and readers are dirt cheap. Even so, they are way faster than floppy.
Sandisk (http://www.sandisk.com/) do em.
Given that this kind of technology exists and is *cheap*, why are we still using floppies?
Deleted
So far, everyone's been suggesting "Use format X", but surely a variety of formats would ba far more useful.
:-)
Since the only reason for removable media is for students to move files to machines that are outside the network, you should pay attention to what those external machines are kitted out with. I would bet that pretty much all of them have a floppy (unless someone's got one of those posh translucent toasters), nearly all will have CD-ROMs, and a handful will have something else. (Such as zip, LS120, CD-RW, &c.) Bearing in mind that these are (mostly) students machines, (and not at a techie college),they're unlikely to be highly specced, and with loads of cool gadgets. Also, not all college hall rooms have phone lines or network cabling, so FileAttaching data, or just dropping out over the network may well be out as well.
Therefore, I would reckon that having reliable floppy drives on all machines would be a start. (They're dirt cheap, too - so you won't even need to get them cleaned - just drop a new one in) And maybe a few networked "posh" drives, like zip and CD-RW, for students with a shedload of data. If these start to get over-used, get some more. If they're not, then you don't need them.
... Or you could just give everyone that comes in to the computer rooms a wodge of punch cards, and let them work it out for themselves.
From what you say, I would guess that the ones using floppies dont know any better. I would suggest making a 'flyer' with instructions for saving files to the student's server drive. Start with some clipart of a broken floppy and a catchy headline like "When your floppy dies, your term paper dies with it. Save to your Net Storage drive and be protected." Then put instructions for saving to and reading from the net folder both at public terminals and at the dorm.
Put one at each public terminal. print lots, kids will probably take them back to the dorm.
--IronHelix
http://www.electronicexpress.com/viddigcamsonyMEM. html
No sig here...
Is it just me or have they dropped in reliability? I mean, they were never perfect, but 10 years ago I could copy something onto floppy, carry it around for 20 minutes and as long as I avoiding obvious things like speakers it would be fine once I got to the destination.
If this happens when moving between two different machines, I'd suggest that the floppy head alignment of one or both is out of alignment. If you take the "bad" floppy back to the machine it was formatted on,and it is no longer "bad", this is a dead giveaway. You actually may have better luck keeping the factory reformatting.
When I was a youngster and floppy drives were state of the art, aligning the heads (at least in the 8 and 5 inch drivers) used to be one of the service procedures you'd perform. I expect these days you just chuck the drive and put a new one in rather than do any kind of service on them.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
While these aren't the best solution, they are more fairly reliable, more so than floppies at least. We've had an initiative on campus to purchase all Lab and Classroom systems with internal zip drives. It has worked well. We provide students with space on our servers as well, about 10MB. This isn't enough for any significant number of large documents or powerpoint presentations. Zip disks have done an admirable job of solving this problem. It gives students a way to archive the files from thier network space once they are done with it, and gives them a place to store files larger than those allowed within the 10MB. I'd look at this one again if I were you. It's practical and works reasonably well.
Why don't get an account at YAHOO? You can upload 10MB, each file can be as big as 5MB. You can accesses it from everywhere, even on vacations, you go to a CyberCafe and that's it!
There are plenty internet-based storage services our thee. For Mac users, you can get 20megs worth of storage from Apple's iTools service with an "iDisk".
There are plenty other net companies that offer this kind of service which would be usable by PCs, Linuces and other unices which would offer an adequate transport and backup solution.
Those sites are generally backup-up and relativelly secure, so it should be good enough for students. Also, you dont have to carry around the actual media, and it's accessilbe to any machine connected to the net.
Karma karma karma karma karmeleon: it comes and goes, it comes and goes.
If you look at the cost/capacity curve of cheap portable media over the last 20 years, the floppy disk is surely an anomoly. For example, one reference point on this curve is the Commodore 4040 hard drive - about $1800 in 1980, two 5 1/4 inches, about 180kB (I think). Very reliable - I still have disks that work. The 3 1/2 inch floppy has been standard equipment for about 13 years, and really has not advanced any. Last time I bought one it cost me $24. Obviously some group of vendors needs to get together to research and push a new standard. People are using hard drives as portable media, which is a sad state of affairs. Until the right product is found in your local PC builder's shop, it will not take off. Soild state media may be do-able because chip prices are so low, but the product would still probably be too expensive to be disposable. It would also have to be extremely strong to survive the abuse I would dish out. Perhaps a 1/2x1x2" thick rectangle with a belt clip, static-protected USB connection at one end, and a LCD readout on other to indicate capacity remaining. Cost should be no more than $40 for 100MB. It must be able to plug in with no drive necessary.
Aside from the relative technical illiteracy of these students, my guess is that your public file space is not used because of a weak interface. Samba, Netatalk, and secure web access to the filesystem would all encourage your users to abandon floppies altogether.
Documentation, as well as an all-out propaganda campaign, would make a difference as well. Assuming that your users have modems (or better Internet access) on the other computers they use, you could make a big difference with an education campaign, centered on users in your public labs.
For many students this isn't such a bad idea since their only computer is the one at the university's computer center. For the other students they could use zip disks, floppies and use a backup station to synchronize their disks with their on-line backup account.
Being so far down the list, I don't reckon anyone will get to see this :(
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Keep a couple of networked floppy drives in PC's that people have access to. If it's enough of a hassle, it will encourage people to use network shares or other types of media. And by leaving just a couple, people that really don't have an alternative will still be able to transfer stuff to their home PC.
science is a religion
Readers, you will have to scroll a long way before you get to these good ideas: Network Drives and Education.
Network Storage can be secure enough for term papers, and cheap enough for every student.
Education: All it took for me to backup to multiple floppies in the eighties was a display by the sysadmins - a collection of bad floppies torn apart to show their very fragile innards. This was back when the bookstore was charging like two dollars per.
My university had a large Appletalk network in '87. So some folks were savvy enough to set up network storage for their friends even then!
But mostly it was many floppies and hard copy. Geez, any kind of old fashioned crash could hose three hours of wee hour work, so we were very paranoid
The floppy drive is the best air intake for a box with case fans or power supply fans blowing out. They end up looking like something from a B horror movie after a few months. And cleaning them, even with canned air, can mess with the heads. So cover your floppy slot with external cardboard and a piece of tape, like a pet door, if necessary!
Keep in mind, an individual is very responsible with his new fragile CD-RW, or a floppy with his thesis on it.
:)
People as a whole are idiots with this sort of thing. They'll toss the disk in with that pen that leaked just ten minutes ago, place their keys in the same place as an unprotected CD, or worse, place it in their back pocket (more for floppies than CDs of course).
The best way to do it? I don't know, but if you've already got a smart card/mag stripe card access system on campus, broaden the scope. No one messes up their access cards when it's -20 degrees and they need to get to their damned dorm room. Give them all card readers for their computers (at added cost, but hey, it's a one shot.) For off-campus access, use an X-Drive style frontend. There's got to be plenty of them by now.
Network storage bails you out in a lot of ways. One, you should already have a network in a school that large. Two, You're already backing it up if you do, possibly with a tape robot. Three, it's going to ultimately be a hell of a lot cheaper than Zip disks, CD-RWs, and to be damned sure, flash memory. Four, no more "My disk is corrupted!" errors.
Admittedly, this does present the hurdle of setting it all up, and of people thinking that they suddenly have a few gigs to keep their mp3's. But user quotas are your friend.
Now, if you don't mind, I'm going back to writing all of my critical data on a series of stone tablets, and then sealing them in lexan cases. Only 5 billion tablets to go...
Raptor
Raptor
"Procrastination is great. It gives me a lot more time to do things that I'm never going to do."
If you're thinking of getting a digital Camera, get NiMH batteries (2 sets) and a charger. They eat current and the draw kills alkalines.
Side swipe: Isn't it a pleasure to have your system reboot just to hang on that helpful Winblows piece of crap telling you it updated the clock?
--
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
And Apple was criticized for not including floppy drives on their iMacs and G3's and g4's. Once again Apple realized which way the wind blows.
I tell all my students that if they can't turn in thier report because its floppy went bad, that they should give me the floppy. Linux is really quite good at getting the data off the things. I have a couple ways of getting thier data:
Try mounting the thing as if it were good. Sometimes the drive they tried it on was flakey, and it works just fine for me. mount /dev/fd0 /mnt -t msdos. Email them thier word file so they can print it for me.
If the floppy really is bad, then do a direct dump to a file: dd if=/dev/fd0 of=floppy.img. This will probably die at some point, but we'll see how much we get first. Do a strings floppy.img | more to see what's there. If thier text from thier report shows up, copy it to a file and print it out. Formatting will be gone, but that's what they get for saving to MSWord
If the error shows up before their data is found, then I can start the dd at a higher block, and bypass it.
If it's the word file that's corrupt or the disk is virus ridden, the strings program will also work quite nicely.
Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
How is this hypocritical? The original poster said ANY PC can boot floppy, which is untrue. I said MOST can boot ATAPI.
We need to use Floppy RAID-5. Send the file to three floppies striped with distributed parity.
/mnt/floppy /mnt/floppy
......RAID5ext2: please insert disk _2_
......RAID5ext2: please insert disk _3_
......Done
# insmod RAID5
# mount -t RAID5ext2
# cp $file
Of course, there would be a lot of ways to implement this.
Daniel
You can do RAID if you have two floppy drives in your machine. Just point a couple loopback devices at your drives, and tell the md driver about them. (it can't talk to fd0 and fd1 directly.) With RAID1 mirroring, you shouldn't have reliability problems.
BTW, don't actually do this! I tried it a while ago to see if it would work. (with striping for higher speed, since I know that floppies are unreliable:) For one thing, you can't write both floppy drives at the same time. (maybe if they were on separate floppy controllers...)
#define X(x,y) x##y
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,
A long long time ago I got 100 Imation disks for free ($20 for 50, $20 mail in rebate) and haven't experienced -any- trouble with them. Yes, I carry them around in my back pocket and have even sat down then and cracked one, but the data remained secure. Also, they are one of the few companies to produce 12x CDR media, and have (IMHO) the best (if not cheapest) CDR(W)s on market today. And this is from the company that makes tape. (3M)
---
In high school "exploring technology" class, where we had a C64 that controlled a robot arm through it's IO port (that's where I became a geek :), we found that the 5.25" floppies would be erased if we left them on top of the monitor _as it was turned on_, but not otherwise.
#define X(x,y) x##y
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,
The way to MAKE students stop relying on poor media like floppies for important projects/assignments is to deny them floppy access in the first place. Lock or remove the drives. If nothing else, lock them out by software. Whatever. If they want to bring a file from off site, make them e-mail it to themselves.
Then they will use the user drive space, or whatever better measures that you have provided.
TangoChaz
--------------------
TangoChaz
--------------------
Wise men talk because they have something to say, fools because the
I've tried tons of floppies tons of drives tons of machines. Many disks don't work. I once collected all the floppies in my house stacked them up, make some purty TOMSRTBT labels and proceded to put the foot high stack through the TOMSRTBT install script about 15% worked. I don't know mabey its just me.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
Did this several times for some friends in my dorm. Works wonders. Got a dudes report back (minus MS word formatting). That particular disk was even worse becaue the directories and part of the FAT tables were in bad areas, but I could still at least do some recovery.
Charge them for it too (well, not if you are an instructor, that's kinda sketchy). But seriously, after I let the dude know that he should keep backups and use better floppies to begin with (he had an old floppy that his mom got from work) he never came back with the same problem, and I think some other people on the floor found out about it and started backing up better.