Monday, October 27, 2014

Portable Drive

Today, I made an hour's drive south to pick up this gadget without knowing exactly how it worked or whether it would work.  But I was willing to give it a try.


I had mentioned in an older post about the box of old 3.5 floppy disks I had stored many of my past manuscripts on.  Unfortunately, I failed to make a backup copy or even a paper copy.  I hit old used and second hand shops looking for old computers that still had a 3.5 disk drive but was told those computers were far too old now and were thrown out immediately without ever hitting the store shelves.  So, dejected, I realized I would never be able to open those old disks again.  I continued looking on Kijiji for old computers but wasn't having any luck.  Then I saw this little guy advertised claiming to be able to read those old 3.5 floppy disks with this little machine that hooked up to your PC with the use of a USB port.  And he only wanted $10 for the thing.  I figured if it didn't work out, at least I'd only be out ten bucks (plus the cost of gas).


Long story short, I went and bought it and brought it home.  And guess what?  It works!  Yes.  I was so bloody excited when the information on the disk flickered and then appeared on my computer!  All my years of back work have been saved!  Yay!!!  I have no idea where one of these things can be purchased, as the fellow who sold it me informed me that he bought it at a giant warehouse sale but never used it himself so didn't even know if it worked.

I can't tell you how much this means to me.  True, many of the manuscripts on those disks are very, very old, and if I'm going to be publishing any of them, they need a huge edit job or even rewrite.  But at least they are there, not gone forever as I feared. 



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