I don’t know how it happened, but somehow I pay for four whole terabytes of cloud storage every month. Sure, it’s shared with the entire household, but over the years I went from a few gigs of free cloud storage to a substantial annual fee for a big hard drive in the sky.
That’s probably perfectly in accordance with the business people’s plans, but before most of the world had a broadband connection and massive data centers covered the world, you had to be the caretaker of your own data, and this is how we kept it safe.
Floppy disks: The original save button
Don’t pin them up with fridge magnets
Today, floppy disks live on in spirit as the universal symbol for saving a file. It’s a little funny to think that there are several generations of computer users who see this icon and have no idea what it actually represents. But, to quote Kurt Vonnegut, “So it goes.”
Floppies can only store a few hundred kilobytes or a few megs. The most popular latter format held just 1.44MB of data, but in a world where a hard drive might only be 40MB in size, that’s still enough to back up word processor files and presentations.
You’ll want to make multiple copies too, because floppies were fragile. In fact, losing my computer programming homework multiple times in high school was the whole reason I blew a month’s allowance on an enormous 64MB USB flash drive, but we’ll get to that later.
Funnily enough, the floppy isn’t completely dead. There are still important infrastructure systems that rely on floppies to work. A fact that does not help me sleep well at night.
QuizThe wild world of pre-cloud data storage
Trivia challenge
Before the cloud, we had spinning disks and prayer — see how much you remember about the glory days of physical storage.
Floppy DisksOptical MediaTape DrivesCapacityHistory
The iconic 3.5-inch floppy disk that dominated the ’90s had a maximum storage capacity of how much?
Correct! The standard 3.5-inch high-density floppy held 1.44 MB — barely enough for a handful of Word documents by modern standards. It’s wild to think entire operating systems were once distributed on stacks of these little guys.
Not quite! The correct answer is 1.44 MB. While 2.88 MB ‘extended density’ floppies did exist, they were rare and barely caught on — 1.44 MB was the reigning champion of the floppy era.
Which company invented the floppy disk in the late 1960s?
That’s right — IBM invented the floppy disk, with the first 8-inch version arriving around 1971. The project was led by David Noble, and the goal was simply to load microcode into the IBM System/370 mainframe. Nobody predicted it would reshape personal computing.
Close guess, but it was IBM! The floppy disk was born from a very unglamorous need: getting microcode into mainframes. IBM engineer David Noble led the effort, and the resulting 8-inch disk quietly launched a storage revolution.
What does ‘CD-R’ stand for, and what makes it different from a regular CD?
Nailed it! CD-R stands for Compact Disc – Recordable, and once you burned data onto it, that data was there forever — or until you left it face-down on a desk for a week. The ‘burning’ process literally used a laser to make permanent marks in a dye layer.
Not quite! CD-R stands for Compact Disc – Recordable. The key word is ‘once’ — you could write to it, but never erase or change it. That’s what separated it from the CD-RW (Rewritable), which let you wipe and reuse the disc.
Magnetic tape storage is considered ancient history, but it’s still widely used today for what purpose?
You got it! Magnetic tape never died — it just moved to the basement. Huge organizations like banks, studios, and cloud providers still use tape for cold storage because it’s incredibly cheap per gigabyte and can last decades. Modern tape cartridges can hold tens of terabytes each.
Surprisingly, tape is still very much alive! The correct answer is enterprise backup and archiving. While it sounds prehistoric, modern tape cartridges hold tens of terabytes and cost pennies per gigabyte compared to hard drives, making them a go-to for cold storage in 2024.
The original 8-inch floppy disk shrank to 5.25 inches, then to 3.5 inches. What was the defining physical feature of the 3.5-inch design that made it more durable?
Double win! The 3.5-inch floppy had both a rigid hard plastic shell AND a sliding metal shutter that covered the read/write slot when the disk wasn’t in use. This made it far tougher than the floppy 5.25-inch version, which you could literally bend — and ruin — with your bare hands.
Almost! The answer is actually both B and C. The 3.5-inch floppy’s genius was combining a rigid plastic shell with a sliding metal shutter over the data slot. The 5.25-inch predecessor had a flexible sleeve and an always-exposed slot, making it easy to accidentally destroy.
When burning a music CD in the late ’90s and early 2000s, what was the dreaded consequence of a ‘buffer underrun’ error?
Correct, and painful! A buffer underrun happened when your PC couldn’t feed data to the CD burner fast enough, causing the laser to stop mid-burn. Since the disc was already partially written, it became a shiny, expensive coaster. This is why people would nervously avoid touching their computer during a burn.
Oh, if only it had just slowed down! The correct answer is that the disc was permanently ruined. A buffer underrun broke the continuous writing process, leaving the disc in a half-written, unreadable limbo with no recovery option. Losing a blank CD-R was a real sting back when they weren’t exactly cheap.
The Iomega Zip disk was a popular storage solution in the mid-to-late ’90s. What was the capacity of the original Zip disk?
Exactly right — 100 MB! At a time when floppy disks maxed out at 1.44 MB, the Zip disk felt almost sci-fi. Graphic designers and digital photographers loved them. Later versions bumped up to 250 MB and even 750 MB, but the original 100 MB model was the one that made everyone’s jaw drop.
The original Zip disk held 100 MB — a staggering amount compared to the 1.44 MB floppy it was meant to replace. Iomega later released 250 MB and 750 MB versions, but the 100 MB original is the one that defined the brand and earned it a cult following in the late ’90s.
The ‘Click of Death’ was a notorious failure symptom associated with which storage device?
Spot on! The Iomega Zip drive became infamous for its ‘Click of Death’ — a rhythmic clicking sound that signaled imminent drive or disk failure. Worse, an infected drive could corrupt every disk inserted into it, spreading the problem. It became one of the most dreaded sounds in ’90s computing.
The culprit was the Iomega Zip drive! Its ‘Click of Death’ was a repetitive clicking sound that meant the drive head was failing — and it could corrupt every disk you inserted afterward, spreading data loss like a disease. It’s still considered one of the most notorious hardware failures of the personal computing era.
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Burning CDs and DVDs for “serious” backups
Freaking laser beams
Moving from 1.44MB floppies to 650MB CDs was a mind-blowing transition. When writable CD-R discs and drives became affordable and common, we quickly shifted to using them for backups. Factory-pressed CDs are incredibly durable and can last decades or centuries in theory, but CD-Rs aren’t too shabby either.
While the light-sensitive dye will degrade, you can still get about a decade out of these discs. I have personally burned discs from over 20 years ago that still work fine, like my old band’s demo disc! Most people didn’t need to preserve data for that long, and CDs were a cheap and reliable way to save your stuff.
External drives and USB flash storage take over
Any port in a storm
The main reason we had to burn data to cheap writable CDs and later DVDs was because hard drive storage was at a premium. The cost per MB and later GB of data was just too high to use hard drives as a form of cold storage.
But as platter density increased and cost per GB went down, the trends began to change. Hard drives had the key advantage that you could do incremental backups on them. You can just add whatever’s changed at the end of the day, week, or month. They were reliable on a scale of years, and so hard drive backup became common.
We went through the same general process with flash memory. At first, it was incredibly expensive, but flash memory became cheap enough that some people threw their files on a thumb drive, and then threw the thumb drive into a drawer. Of course, using a thumb drive to back up data was a bad idea then, and it’s still a bad idea today.
- Storage Capacity
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16TB
- Brand
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Western Digital
The WD Elements Desktop External Hard Drive is great for your storage needs. It comes in sizes up to 24TB and supports USB 3.2 Gen 1 speeds for data transfer.
Network backups and the early “personal cloud”
NAS before NAS
While it was more a business than home solution, using a drive shared over a network for backups was a viable strategy. Dedicated Network-Attached Storage took a while to come on the scene and was strictly a business solution at first, but sharing a drive connected to one computer on the network was something anyone could do.
Home tape backups
Finally, there was also tape backup. Tape is cheap and reliable, though the drives were pretty expensive. This was, again, mostly a business-class solution, but I clearly remember people who had tape drives in their 5.25-inch drive bays. Mostly professionals who did important work at home, but there were tape systems for regular home PCs.
Most of these solutions still exist, and, honestly, you should still use them in addition to the cloud! It’s never a good idea to put all your eggs in one basket. Especially if it’s not your basket.
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
