I recently received an email from a friend who asked me if I had any of these. Her mother was looking for a few. Being the old geek that I am and knowing I rarely throw anything old out, it was a safe bet. I told her I could part with up to half of the box because I still use some with my Sony Mavica.
Sony Mavica
I know most of you use your phones, and I even use my flip phone to take many images for this and my other blog, but, I still like using my Mavica from time to time. I only wish I had the version which recorded to LS-120 Super Floppies instead of regular 3.5. I never did have one which took the “optional memory stick.” The only reason I’m not using my LS-120 disks more right now is both machines which have the drive aren’t on my desk. I haven’t taken the time to rearrange my current desktop to install one of my other drives.
Yes, I debated about writing this post for logikalblog.com because it is more about technology than writing, but, you writers need to be thinking about this. I have written multiple posts about “how do you backup the human race?” for multiple sites and only a few of you are starting to write about this. At least one other writer managed to put it in terms Millenials “might” understand. Others are too busy declaring the floppy dead.
This isn’t just some old guy ranting about bygone days. This is your future. Within the next decade you will face the nuking of cloud storage, disappearance of Twitter and loss of most, if not all FaceBook content.
Got your attention?
It’s a reality.
Ordinary market forces will take Twitter out. You may think it is cool, but if you don’t have profits _and_ user growth, you eventually run out of people willing to give you money. If Microsoft buys them it is an absolute certainty they will disappear in less than 5 years. While you may not think much about your tweets today, if that is the only place they exist, when Twitter goes under they are gone. Months or years from now when you want to reference one it will suck to be you.
Facebook will find itself mired in litigation, then appearing before Congress to testify, followed by new draconian regulations. Adding insult to injury, every hour of every day Facebook and Google collect more personal/private information about average citizens than Richard Nixon did making his “party tapes.” Keep in mind he was impeached and thrown out of office for that. Today Internet companies are far more heinous in their gathering of our private data. Equifax was quite possibly the final straw. Our current batch of elected officials, once chanting how they were going to throw out almost all “burdensome” regulations, will, in a few short weeks, find itself having to impose new and severe ones on all of these Wall Street darlings.
It doesn’t matter which way Facebook goes down, if you put “your life” on there, all of those photos and stories go down with it.
Moving to “the cloud” was always a stupid idea. It’s the kind of idea which could only appeal to a Keller MBA. Only put the lines on a spreadsheet which support your position and leave off all of the downside so you look like upper management material.
Only the daftest of individuals could, at this point, believe cloud services are both safe and secure. Every one of them will, if they don’t already, have the same kind of management Equifax has. In order to cut costs they will trim support and security, putting off installing critical security updates. Adding insult to injury, it could be years before any of us actually hear about a cloud breach. I’m not saying it will be years before it happens, I’m saying it could be years later before anyone hears about it.
Why?
I’m not a lawyer, but, as I understand it, all of these laws about announcing data breaches only apply to companies where consumer information “could be compromised.” So, when XYZ corporation switches to the cloud for their internal applications, documents and clinical trial information about all of the drugs they are working on, next idiot phone, whatever, when that gets stolen it isn’t required to report it. Setting up a line in a country which doesn’t honor U.S. Patents anyway or have FDA regulations to manufacture the drug or whatever, for sale, will take months, if not years. Then, the company which actually owns the thing will have to find a court with jurisdiction to sue the offender in.
As I said, it will take months, if not years before the public finds out Bill & Doug’s cloud service had a security breach and everything was taken.
How about all of your Google Docs, or your Google Drive where you stored naked pictures of yourself and others? Apple has already had to deal with the nude Celebrity photo scandal. No matter what they say, much of the public won’t buy the story. Just how long before we have some massive headline grabbing cloud breach where there is no way for the service to spin the story away from them? Not long I think.
So, yes my friend, I still have some 3.5″ floppies, LS-120 Super Floppies and drives to use them. I also have a bunch of external hard drives which connect via various means. Why? Because nothing important can ever leave your physical possession. It is sad that so many corporations will have to go bankrupt before they learn that.
The real shocker in all of this is people are now charging north of $30 for a box of 10 floppy disks but Sony used to make 100 floppy bricks which, when you cashed in the rebate, were free.