The label says 1997. It’s an Iomega Zip disk. Capacity: 100MB. Yep, back in 1997, that was really something, 67 times the capacity of a floppy disk and far cheaper than those outrageously expensive CD-R discs and the rare drives that swallowed them.
\n
\nThe Zip disk phase was necessary. It filled the removable storage gap between floppy diskettes and optical discs for a few years. In fact, I remember getting PCs with ZIP drives pre-installed.<\/p>\n
The original Zip disks stored 100MB each. Eventually they came up with 250MB models. Iomega also marketed the JAZ disk, which was a 1G and 2G format. They’re all gone now, but some of the disks remain, as I discovered this past weekend.<\/p>\n
Like a good businessman, every year end I archive my file cabinet. All my financial records, receipts, statements, they call get collected and placed into a storage box. Files are copied onto a DVD and shoved into the fire safe.<\/p>\n
I also go back a few years, and take a prior year’s storage box to purge it. The files either get shredded or recycled, so I don’t have to keep buying storage boxes.<\/p>\n
This year the 1997 box was up for purging. In amongst the papers I found a Zip disk.<\/p>\n
I was bemused.<\/p>\n
It probably made perfect sense to archive my financial data on a Zip disk back in 1997. It was a popular format, and I figured it would be around for a while. It wasn’t, of course. Then again, who can predict which formats will be viable 15 years in the future?<\/p>\n
Curiosity got to me, so I decided to see whether or not I could even access the information on the disk. So out into the boneyard I went.<\/p>\n
Of all the Zip drives I’ve owned (and there were quite a few), I kept one. It’s a 250MB external USB Zip drive that I probably retired in 2004 or so.<\/p>\n
So I plugged the Zip drive into my PC’s USB port and waited.<\/p>\n
And waited.<\/p>\n
The 250MB Zip disk, loged in the drive for 8 years, wasn’t being read. But as I was about to give up hope, the Computer window on my PC flowered open with the 250MB disk’s contents. It was an archive of my Weekly Wambooli Salad<\/em> newsletter, which I last saved in 2004. (That’s how I knew how old the disk was.)<\/p>\n Eventually, I slid the 100MB disk archive from 1997 into the ZIP drive. Low and behold, it appeared in the Computer window. And, true to form, there were the financial files from 1997 — none of which are useful to me today because the software I used back then is incompatible with today’s software.<\/p>\n Still, my point wasn’t to get old archives, it was to see whether I could access the information at all. Project: Success.<\/p>\n Now if I could only think 15 years into the future, and figure out whether I’m cursing myself for storing old financial data on a DVD in a file format unreadable by any future computer software.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The label says 1997. It’s an Iomega Zip disk. Capacity: 100MB. Yep, back in 1997, that was really something, 67 times the capacity of a floppy disk and far cheaper than those outrageously expensive CD-R discs and the rare drives that swallowed them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3191"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3191\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3194,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3191\/revisions\/3194"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}