Floppy Disks Are Unreliable

It seems that weekly I encounter faculty and students who discover that their floppy disk was corrupted or erased, causing them to lose their PowerPoint presentation or their Microsoft Word document.
My recommendation is that faculty and students should transport information either on a USB memory device (often known as a “thumb drive” or “jump drive”) or on a CD-R or CD-RW. USB memory devices are typically available at stores selling consumer electronics starting at $20 and have the capacity to store the same amount of information as ten or more floppies. CD-RW disks typically sell for no more than $2 each.
If students or faculty are compelled to use floppy disks for transporting data, it is recommended that a backup copy of presentations or documents be emailed as an attachment to an email account that can be accessed over the web, such as a Yahoo account. Then if the floppy disk is corrupted, there is an excellent chance of recovering the work from the email account, using the Internet connectivity of any computer.
There are three common additional problems students seem to encounter saving documents. Occasionally people erroneously save only a “shortcut” to their document on their storage media or email attachment. Or in the attempt to “burn” a CD, the files are not properly recorded, so they arrive at school with a blank or partially recorded CD. Or the floppy drive that they use at home is out of alignment, so diskettes recorded there can only be read on that machine. Attempting to read the file(s) on a second machine (at work, at a friend’s home, or at a suitably equipped library) will catch all of these recording problems.
-DD