Floppy Disks - Time to throw out?
Posted by Dirk D Dykstra at 5/9/2006 3:58 PM 
Categories: Information Technology,Student Work,Instructional Technology
Categories: Information Technology,Student Work,Instructional Technology
The Issue
Should we discontinue the use of floppy disks?
Should we discontinue purchasing computers with floppy drives?
My Comments
Why are we using floppy disks? Does your organization have an application that requires floppy drives? The key here is whether your organization has a specific need for floppy disks. Most organizations eliminated the need for floppies a long time ago. However, that does not mean they quit using floppies. Some people are very attached to them and feel strongly about not wanting to give them up.
USB flash drive pricing is now so low and the technology so fast that it is way too inefficient to keep using floppies in a production environment. If you are paying an employee to work on a computer, you are wasting money allowing them to use floppies. If you have students working in a class or lab, they are wasting precious time using floppies. When you can put a flash drive (thumb drive, USB drive, etc.) in the USB port and in seconds transfer hundreds of megabytes worth of data, why would you use floppies? So for speed and efficiency the answer is switch to flash drives.
What about virus, trojans, and other uploaded nasties? Do the flash drive increase these? For internal transfers off the network - no. You had to have it somewhere else in your organization anyway. But if it is an internal transfer, why are you doing it off the network? Between your network folders, groupware and e-mail you should be handling all of your internal transfers on-line. This is way safer, leaves audit trails and is usually faster.
So is it better to bring data into your network with a flash card or floppy? Or should you bring it in over the Internet? I talked about this to a degree in my article on students bringing work to school by floppy or over the Internet. Check it out - Files From Home. If you bring your data into the network over the Internet, then you can allow your firewall and anti-virus program to do their job with one point of contact. If you allow work to come in through flash cards or floppies, then your desktop is the first line of defense. How secure are you with that?
Now when we look internally we usually see no reason not to use the network. No need for floppies. Externally we should have our data come through the firewall, the spam filter, the anti-virus program and preferably at only one point of entry, greatly reducing the locations we need to monitor. All of this would point to eliminating floppies completely, both in the new machines and as a means to transfer data.
Reality Check - Your staff may not be excited about doing this. What about all of that data on floppies now? What about those few who do not have Internet access at home and do not own a flash drive? For all of this they invented USB floppy drives. Eliminate the floppy drives, encourage the use of the network to transfer internally and the Internet to transfer from at home, but make USB floppy drives available for those few floppy die hards.
I have found this particularly useful in a couple of computer labs I set up recently. Twenty computers and one USB floppy drive. The ironic part is that these USB floppy drives were purchased for MAC laptops many years ago and never used. Now we use them on our Windows XP computers. The students who have to use floppies do. However, most of the students are using Novell's NetStorage to transfer their files to and from school and home. There are many FTP products, including open source, that will allow your organization to add this ability for your staff and/or students. So go ahead and start phasing out those floppy drives, if you haven't already.
This still leaves the USB flash cards. If you have a filtering, firewalling, anti-spamming, anti-virusing, etc going on at the border of your network, then the flash cards going directly to a desktop is still a hole in your security, as it was with the floppies. So, while we throw out floppies we find that many of the same problems will still haunt us as technology always gives and takes. Security will forever be a give and take. But this is a topic for another time.
Dirk D Dykstra
Should we discontinue the use of floppy disks?
Should we discontinue purchasing computers with floppy drives?
My Comments
Why are we using floppy disks? Does your organization have an application that requires floppy drives? The key here is whether your organization has a specific need for floppy disks. Most organizations eliminated the need for floppies a long time ago. However, that does not mean they quit using floppies. Some people are very attached to them and feel strongly about not wanting to give them up.
USB flash drive pricing is now so low and the technology so fast that it is way too inefficient to keep using floppies in a production environment. If you are paying an employee to work on a computer, you are wasting money allowing them to use floppies. If you have students working in a class or lab, they are wasting precious time using floppies. When you can put a flash drive (thumb drive, USB drive, etc.) in the USB port and in seconds transfer hundreds of megabytes worth of data, why would you use floppies? So for speed and efficiency the answer is switch to flash drives.
What about virus, trojans, and other uploaded nasties? Do the flash drive increase these? For internal transfers off the network - no. You had to have it somewhere else in your organization anyway. But if it is an internal transfer, why are you doing it off the network? Between your network folders, groupware and e-mail you should be handling all of your internal transfers on-line. This is way safer, leaves audit trails and is usually faster.
So is it better to bring data into your network with a flash card or floppy? Or should you bring it in over the Internet? I talked about this to a degree in my article on students bringing work to school by floppy or over the Internet. Check it out - Files From Home. If you bring your data into the network over the Internet, then you can allow your firewall and anti-virus program to do their job with one point of contact. If you allow work to come in through flash cards or floppies, then your desktop is the first line of defense. How secure are you with that?
Now when we look internally we usually see no reason not to use the network. No need for floppies. Externally we should have our data come through the firewall, the spam filter, the anti-virus program and preferably at only one point of entry, greatly reducing the locations we need to monitor. All of this would point to eliminating floppies completely, both in the new machines and as a means to transfer data.
Reality Check - Your staff may not be excited about doing this. What about all of that data on floppies now? What about those few who do not have Internet access at home and do not own a flash drive? For all of this they invented USB floppy drives. Eliminate the floppy drives, encourage the use of the network to transfer internally and the Internet to transfer from at home, but make USB floppy drives available for those few floppy die hards.
I have found this particularly useful in a couple of computer labs I set up recently. Twenty computers and one USB floppy drive. The ironic part is that these USB floppy drives were purchased for MAC laptops many years ago and never used. Now we use them on our Windows XP computers. The students who have to use floppies do. However, most of the students are using Novell's NetStorage to transfer their files to and from school and home. There are many FTP products, including open source, that will allow your organization to add this ability for your staff and/or students. So go ahead and start phasing out those floppy drives, if you haven't already.
This still leaves the USB flash cards. If you have a filtering, firewalling, anti-spamming, anti-virusing, etc going on at the border of your network, then the flash cards going directly to a desktop is still a hole in your security, as it was with the floppies. So, while we throw out floppies we find that many of the same problems will still haunt us as technology always gives and takes. Security will forever be a give and take. But this is a topic for another time.
Dirk D Dykstra
Comments