this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2024
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Its been a while since I used one but arent 3.5's unreliable? I still remember having problems with data integrity way back then. I dont remember them as some rock solid tech and I'd rather put my faith into 650MB CDs if I had to choose.
Granted I'm too young to have handed floppys but from what I understand from my dad and other people the appeal of floppys today is not reliability but rather that normal people have moved on to USB and CDs and have long since thrown away their floppy drives and some people only know them as icon buttons making them pretty good spot to hide classified documents and government secrets
I can't imagine that's the main reason. You can buy a 3.5" floppy reader with a usb connection for like 20 bucks on amazon and anyone who wanted to get their hands on government secrets would not be deterred by that.
I think the simplest and most likely reason is that updating things and making changes in bureaucracies is hard on its own, and any time you start dealing with tech it's all a house of cards where one system depends on another and so changing any one thing will either make it all fall down or bring along with it massive sweeping changes.
3.5 inch disks only held about 2MB on a good day. Reliable or not, you won't get much on that disk these days.
Unless you are going to make your own backups and take them somewhere else, I would use a cloud solution. Yes, you have to trust the company you choose not to fuck with your data, but they are fault-tolerant solutions that will likely last longer than some random removable solution.