[ The PC Guide | System Care Guide | Backups and Disaster Recovery | Backup Methods, Devices and Media ]

Floppy disks are not suitable as backup devices for a modern PC. It's taken many years for the technology to advance far enough that I would make this blanket statement, but we are here now. Floppies are slow, relatively unreliable, and far too small to make effective backup devices in the age of 1 GB hard disks. Their only possible use for backup is for archiving small files; even here, I recommend that multiple copies be stored due to the likelihood of read errors on disks that have been in storage for a period of time.

Floppy disks are most importantly used as a vehicle for storing critical information about your system, for use in the event of a system problem. These emergency boot disks are best stored on floppies so they can be used in the event of a hard disk problem.

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