zipping to a zip file on a floppy

[Larry]

I know you're not suppsosed to save a document to a floppy. But is it
ok to zip a document on the hard drive into a winzip document that's on
a floppy?

Larry

 

[Jezebel]

There's no problem about using floppies in general -- the thing you musn't
do is save *directly* from Word to floppy. It's OK to *copy* a Word document
to floppy, or to Zip it, PDF it, or fandangle it in any way you lke.

 

[Opinicus]

I know you're not suppsosed to save a document to a floppy.
But is it
ok to zip a document on the hard drive into a winzip
document that's on
a floppy?

As long as you don't do it from Word, probably. To be
absolutely safe, do the zipping on the hard drive and copy
the zipped file to the floppy using Windows Explorer.

 

[Larry]

That's two diametrically opposed opinions from Jezebel and Opinicus.

Larry

 

[Jay Freedman]

No, they aren't "diametrically opposed". There are two points here:

- Both of them agree that you shouldn't save, zip, or do anything else
directly from Word to a floppy. That's to prevent document corruption
or a floppy that's suddenly unreadable. ("Would you like to format
this disk? Bwa-ha-ha!")

- They gave slightly different positions on taking a file from the
hard drive and putting it into a zip file on a floppy (outside of
Word). Jezebel said it's ok, Opinicus said "to be absolutely safe" you
should zip it on the hard drive and then copy the zip to the floppy.
The issue here is whether the zipping program has enough
error-handling to keep your data safe if the zip file and its
intermediate temp files don't fit on the floppy at the same time. I
believe most of the major programs like WinZip use your TEMP folder on
the hard drive for the intermediates and only write the finished file
to the floppy, so that's safe enough. But you have to know how your
program behaves, or else play it safe.

Another thing that hasn't been mentioned is that floppies are
something like 1000 times slower than the hard drive, so zipping on
the hard drive and then copying will save some time.

 

[Larry]

Jay,

You're right. "Diametrically opposed" was too strong.

As for speed, you're right that that's also a point to consider. I just
tried that. Zipping a large file (1.3 MB) into a winzip file on a
floppy was noticeably slower than doing the same thing on the hard disk.

Larry