[pcshah1996]

One of my first (toy) websites was a silly floppy disk size calculator. You could enter an amount of songs/movies/files/etc and it would tell you how many disks it would take: https://howmanyfloppydisks.com/

It was very grounding to understand how disk capacity has grown over time.

[BizarreByte]

> It was very grounding to understand how disk capacity has grown over time.

And yet the funny thing is, all the documents that are absolutely critical to my personal life would fit on a floppy no problem. That said I'd never have risked them to a floppy even when you could get them new. I never had good luck with floppies lasting any length of time at all.

I think my family's first computer had a 1GB hard drive in it (at most), now I can get an SD card with 1000 times that. It's amazing and truthfully I don't understand how it's possible.

[13of40]

> I never had good luck with floppies lasting any length of time at all.

I worked in a personnel office in the Army for a bit in the mid-90s, and they had a Windows machine with a bunch of documents and spreadsheets on the hard drive. The Staff Sergeant who ran the office was paranoid about losing everything in a hard drive failure, so the first thing he made me do was move all of them off to floppy disks. (I remember he called A: "the alpha drive" if that gives you any hint on his level of tech savviness.) Maybe the disks were old. Maybe it was the humidity. At any rate, it was only a couple of weeks before half that stuff was unreadable.

At the same time, I remember one time I crumpled up one of those 5.25 inch floppies in my TRS-80 programming class in high school, then I realized there was something I wanted off of it and flattened it back out - and it worked!

[bombcar]

Someone once told me that data is measured in gigabytes, but valuable data in bytes. He wasn’t wrong.

[tambourine_man]

I regard music, photos and video as extremely valuable, so that doesn’t apply to me.

[BizarreByte]

I do too, but for me there are levels of importance and my backup strategy reflects that.

There are files I can't live without, files I don't want to lose (photos), and the rest.

[silisili]

Out of curiosity, what are examples of files you can't live without?

[zbrozek]

Encrypted password manager file Previous tax returns License key list 2fa backup codes

Losing any of these would not kill me, but some would be horribly painful.

[BizarreByte]

2FA recovery codes, password manager backup, a few government documents, a few banking/legal documents.

"Can't live without" is hyperbole, but losing any of those things would be a pretty big blow and recovering from the loss would be difficult.

[bombcar]

Almost all of my music is replaceable (rips from CDs, etc). Most of my video by size is DVD rips, but the photos and videos of my own are valueable.

Still less than 10% of my total storage, and easily backed up.

[tambourine_man]

Music is in theory replaceable, but finding and repurchasing everything I've collected over the decades is impractical. Just remembering everything is impossible.

[BizarreByte]

I've never heard that saying, but it's a good one. That's been my exact experience.

[tnias23]

Ha. I often think about modern file and drive sizes in terms of how much space it would take up if in stacked 3.5 floppies. Like a block x feet high by y feet wide by z feet long.

Mind blowing

[z500]

I once wrote a program to actually do this for me when that was all I had to migrate files off my computer. But that was like 25 years ago so the files weren't so big.