Several years ago - I added a second hard drive to my computer - just for data storage.
I store ALL my data on a secone hard drive.
I copied ALL the floppy stuff I had onto the second hard drive.
If I need to change computers - or reformat the operating system I can do all of that and still have my "other hard drive"
Now of course - a hard drive can bite the dust. Soooooo.
I also have a seagate "external hard drive" that I back up my internal data hard drive to. In essence - I mirror the data drive.
I use Outlook for email. It the calender, I set a reminder to do my backup to my external drive.
I thought about and considered all sorts of backup measures. I don't think anything is totally foolproof, but I think, I am pretty safe for data backup.
I used to have a couple of hundred floppys - now I think I have a couple of empty ones hanging around somewhere.
Can't say that I did it deliberately, but have done same thing to the wife's computer.. need to do mine as well.. but her desktop died - motherboard problem... I bought her another one and transferred the hard drive from the dead one to the new one... then the new one died a couple of weeks back... we took a power hit and I don't have ups on it so the operating system wound up corrupted.... finally got a new XP system on the machine, formatted one of the drives just for storage.
It's been a task since I'm not very computer literate, but took it to a tech and explained the situation and what I thought we could do... all he wanted to do was charge me $150 to "maybe" be able to save her data, but he wanted to format both drives, the reload an operating system.
After talking with my son in Austin, who is a programmer manager for an IBM division, he sent me a new XP OS that he had as a spare and a program called UBUNTU - a linux based operating system... using the ubuntu I could get the computer up and running enough to clean up one drive, move all the data to that drive, then reloaded the XP on the other... still can't find the internet with it, but working on it...
Nothing to do with your problem Frank, sorry to have hijacked your thread... but what everyone says is correct according to my son... floppies have a definite life span.. as do magnetic tapes... my wife has been collecting a lot of the Walt Disney movies and a bunch are on tapes...according to the son, in a few years they will be useless..
another factor is: newer computers aren't being made with a floppy disk drive... the new machine I bought my wife doesn't have an "A" drive port.
Hopefully, your editor can provide you a copy of your article, in electronic format so you don't have to retype it....good luck