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From: skyvingt@ilog.UUCP (William Skyvington)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc
Subject: Dead floppies
Message-ID: <10547@ilog.UUCP>
Date: 20 Dec 90 14:06:30 GMT
Reply-To: skyvingt@ilog.UUCP (William Skyvington)
Organization: ILOG, Paris, France
Lines: 29

The rate at which my floppies have been dying over the last year,
since I've been working on several IIcx machines, is outrageous.
I've been using floppies intensively to take work back and forth
between my office and home machines, and to back up personal stuff
(such as the 500-page typescript of my latest novel, and musical
compositions from Performer and Finale). I was happy to have floppy
backup when the internal hard disk of my IIcx crashed about a month
after I bought it. Over the last year, I've encountered the
scandalous "This disk is unreadable" message at least a couple of
dozen times. A kind of Murphy's Law of Death means that it's
inevitably the most important current floppy that gives up the
ghost. Sometimes a floppy is alive and well when I read from it on
a Friday night. Then, when I take it out on Monday morning, to
rewrite on it the efforts of the weekend, it is stone cold dead. At
work, A/UX allows me to keep all my major documents stored safely in
a huge Unix system that is protected against anything short of an
invasion from outer space. So, I've never actually lost anything,
even in the most morbid predicaments. But the situation is scary.
Frankly, I've reached the point at which I've lost all confidence in
Macintosh floppies. I've often wondered if there might be some kind
of morgue capable of carrying out autopsies on my collection of
corpses, to tell me what actually killed them. Meanwhile, I guess I
should start shopping around for some kind of removable hard disk
device for backup and for taking stuff between the office and home.
Is there an ABSOLUTELY IDEAL machine for this purpose?

William Skyvington

skyvingt@ilog.fr