One of my clients referred to Zip disks a few days ago. That really sent me back. Only my rich friends had Jaz drives, whereas the rest of us were still using Zip disks and optical media. Those early USB thumb drives at USB 1.0 speeds were also painfully slow.
My portable storage journey progressed from 5.25” floppy disks, 3.5” diskettes, Zip disk, CD-R/RW, DVD-R/RW, 2.5”/3.5” external HDDs and now portable NVME SSDs.
Being more aware of the passage of time helps me, so setting an alarm is what I do.