Death of the A: drive

Posted by Stephen Gray on Thursday 29 April 2010 at 8:36am
Tags: digital preservation | storage |

Comments (0)

While browsing the shelves in well-known bookshop last week I noticed a lone pack of floppy discs, waiting patiently to be bought by a panic-stricken student with a deadline or perhaps a needy accountant preparing to compile those spreadsheets... This scenario isof course increasingly unlikely as the 'A:' drive fades slowly into memory.

Only this week Sony announced plans to do away with 3.5" discs. These iconic disks are now set to join the ranks of Zip, Syquest and DVD-Rom in the digital storage media retirement village in the sky.

But hang on, I've still got some floppies and they may very well contain the images I took on my (circa 1996) digital camera! With some sense of urgency I realise that in 2010 the search for a direct replacement for the 3.5" floppy would be fruitless.

Image compiled using Creative Commons licensed material

Optical discs like CD, DVD or even Blu-ray are now less commonly used as personal storage formats. Indeed my netbook not only has no 'a:' drive, but no optical drive either. After going through three USB flash memory sticks in one year, I'm reluctant to take that route. Similarly, internal hard drives have a habit of expiring when it's least convenient.

I could be extremely sensible and use multiple solutions. This sounds appealing for ‘work' but would I actually take the time to incrementally back up video clips of my cat?

I turn then, to the cloud and get a warm feeling as I realise that digital storage has become Someone Else's Problem. This is short lived however, as I'm reminded by a colleague that Yahoo! Images only became Flickr after purging all unclaimed photos.

So preserving my files, even on the cloud, turns out to be my responsibility after all. The reason there is no direct replacement for those floppies is that we have ceased to believe the claims of marketeers and now know that no media format is particularly long-lived.

Digital preservation is instead now recognised as an active process and so I begin to upload my images from floppy and into the cloud in the knowledge that if I want them to survive I'll have to keep a close eye on them. With the demise of the floppy, the romantic model of dusty (but secure) media in forgotten drawers also comes to an end.

Comments (0)