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Q:
I heard that floppy drives are being phased out. Is there a way to copy my
floppies to cd?
A:
If you buy a new computer, chances are it won't have a floppy drive! The
general manager of America's largest data storage manufacturer said last
year that within five years there won't be much of a market for floppies.
Even Uncle Bill declared that the floppy is dead. Many options for data storage
are on the market that have larger capacity than our familiar little disk:
CD-R/RW, DVD, Flash Memory, portable hard drives, and USB keys (aka "thumb
drives"). While most of of us still have floppy drives in our computers,
now might be a good time to transfer them onto CD.
Here is the easiest way I found to copy your floppies to CD-R/RW...
1. Create a folder on your desktop. Click the folder and hit F2 to rename (give it a name that will remind you what is in the folder).
2. Open the floppy in your drive and hit Ctrl+A to select all. NOTE: Make sure that your folder option view is set to show hidden files (Tools/Folder Options/View, "Show hidden files and folders"), otherwise you might not copy all the files from the floppy.
3. Copy (Ctrl+C) the files then paste (Ctrl+V) into your new folder. This is a great time to "prune" any files you don't want to keep—do you REALLY need to keep that book report you wrote in 10th grade? If you create several folders, you could also sort the contents before you burn.
4. Now you are ready to
burn your files to CD. In most cases it is as simple as dragging the folders
into a frame in your CD burning program. For detailed generic information
(kinda sounds like an oxymoron) on CD Burning, head on over to our
How to Burn a CD tutorial...
http://www.worldstart.com/tips/file-management/howto-burn-a-cd.htm
The great thing is that the average floppy holds 1.44 MB of data, while a CD-R can hold 700 MB—that means you can fit about 486 floppies on 1 CD-R!
For XP users: after you select the files you want to transfer (or Ctrl+A), you can click "Copy the selected items" in the left hand column which opens a window where you can select where you want the files to go. >From there you can send them to the new folder you created in step 1.
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