Mac Daniel's Advice

Reviving the Lost Art of Archiving

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Manuel Mejia Jr - 2002.02.04

With the advent of the newest iMacs equipped with CD-RW devices ("CD Burners"), the large complaint Apple faced has been put to rest. Since the release of the first Bondi iMac, many Mac users have been commenting on the lack of a built-in floppy drive. Many users had to either get a third party external floppy drive and plug it in or resort to some ethernet network solution that tied the iMac to a Mac with a floppy drive.

Without a floppy or other removable drive or some type of network solution, early iMac users had to depend on either the internal drive or some external Internet-based file server to hold and move their files and applications. Most users just stored their data on the iMac's hard drive.

While hard drives are convenient for quick file access, they are not the optimal device to store files for the long term. Computer users will accumulate letters, memorandums, photographs, drawings, music files, and other files as time goes by. This information has to be archived.

As immortal as the Mac seems to be, components do age and die. If one of those components happens to be your hard drive, that data will not be easy or inexpensive to retrieve - it may not even be retrievable.

In the early days of the Mac, users of computers such as the Plus did not have the now ubiquitous hard drive. Many Plus users used floppy drives to store their information. Those who had some extra money to spend did buy small 20 MB hard drives [they seemed big at the time! dk]. However, the user would often have to transfer files to floppy in order to make room for the applications that they used.

The result of this early disk usage was the development of the habit of archiving floppy disks. This was a good habit. If the hard drive broke down, the odds of losing all your data were nil. You can always go to the backup floppies and load the information onto a replacement hard drive.

When the iMac was marketed, data backup became a chore that many Mac users decided not to do. For many, backups were also impractical because certain files, such as pictures, were simply to large to fit onto a floppy.

Storage for such large files required file compression or use of a larger storage device, like a Zip drive (whose disks seem to be subject to breakdown, according to some users) or CD burners (which cost a great deal of money at the time). As a result, people are no longer archiving data, and they risk losing everything to a hard drive failure, reformat of the hard drive, or malicious deleting to the Trash.

[Don't laugh. One of my sons got in a snit and trashed VirtualPC and the disk image from the family iMac, losing a week's worth of home schooling for himself and two of this brothers. Fortunately we still had the disk image from a week earlier on another Mac, but now we're backing up daily. dk]

Now that CD burner technology has matured and is becoming more common on computers, it is likely to become the storage device that will replace the venerable floppy disk. Large files can be stored with no compression.

Now that data removal and storage has been made easy again, it's a good to revive the lost art of archiving data.

Not sure if you should upgrade your old Mac or replace it? Check the Mac Daniel index to see if we've already addressed your problem.

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