Not The Onion

12420 readers

3360 users here now

Welcome

We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!

The Rules

Posts must be:

Links to news stories from...
...credible sources, with...
...their original headlines, that...
...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”

Comments must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.

And that’s basically it!

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

kescusay

628

Japan declares victory in effort to end government use of floppy disks (japantoday.com)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/nottheonion

111 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Crossposted from [email protected]

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] PieMePlenty 6 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] creditCrazy 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

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.

[–] WhatsHerBucket 1 points 4 months ago

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.