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Nor mine. I distinctly remember back to college circa 2000, copying a project from my computer in the dorms, walking to a project partner's dorm room adjacent t

Nor mine. I distinctly remember back to college circa 2000, copying a project from my computer in the dorms, walking to a project partner's dorm room adjacent to mine, and in that 15 second walk, having the data corrupted. Thumb drives weren't common or cheap, yet, though I did have a Zip Drive, as did nearly all of the school's lab computers. I never had a corruption problem with Zip disks, but man, floppies? Seemed like if I walked near them, they'd get corrupted.

morganvachon 5y ago
I had a lot of issues with corrupted ZIP disks back in those days. They were far more reliable than floppies but far less reliable than hard drives. It got so bad I gave up using them for long term backups and switched to tape for that, relegating ZIP to quick (for the time) transfers between computers and always checking file integrity after every move. USB flash drives were a massive leap forward in sneakernet data shifting.
- KennyBlanken 5y ago
  Zip drives and cartridges were infamously unreliable, like literally every product iomega ever made. The old Bernoulli cartridges would fail all the time, too. They were so incompetent, they didn't make the slot in the case of Jazz drives big enough to accommodate for thermal expansion of the cartridge. On top of that, the eject transport had weak cheap plastic parts that would be destroyed if the cartridge couldn't move. Result: if you used your Jazz drive for copying a bunch of data and then tried to eject it without letting the cartridge cool down first, the drive would make a very expensive snap noise and not only did you have a broken drive, you had a stuck cartridge and no way to read the cartridge even inside the drive it was stuck in. Iomega seemed to only be good at making a product just barely good enough that people couldn't successfully sue them.
KennyBlanken 5y ago
Likely the floppy was ejected too soon and/or had a corrupted filesystem. Or one of you had a floppy drive that needed to be cleaned, or was slightly out of spec and couldn't be read by the other.

morganvachon 5y ago

I had a lot of issues with corrupted ZIP disks back in those days. They were far more reliable than floppies but far less reliable than hard drives. It got so bad I gave up using them for long term backups and switched to tape for that, relegating ZIP to quick (for the time) transfers between computers and always checking file integrity after every move. USB flash drives were a massive leap forward in sneakernet data shifting.

KennyBlanken 5y ago
Zip drives and cartridges were infamously unreliable, like literally every product iomega ever made. The old Bernoulli cartridges would fail all the time, too. They were so incompetent, they didn't make the slot in the case of Jazz drives big enough to accommodate for thermal expansion of the cartridge. On top of that, the eject transport had weak cheap plastic parts that would be destroyed if the cartridge couldn't move. Result: if you used your Jazz drive for copying a bunch of data and then tried to eject it without letting the cartridge cool down first, the drive would make a very expensive snap noise and not only did you have a broken drive, you had a stuck cartridge and no way to read the cartridge even inside the drive it was stuck in. Iomega seemed to only be good at making a product just barely good enough that people couldn't successfully sue them.

KennyBlanken 5y ago

Likely the floppy was ejected too soon and/or had a corrupted filesystem. Or one of you had a floppy drive that needed to be cleaned, or was slightly out of spec and couldn't be read by the other.