Bonum Certa Men Certa

Sometimes Newer is Worse

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Aug 10, 2025

Floppy disk We generally need to reject this dumb notion that "old" means bad

Yesterday I learned from a friend that he had silently lost old E-mail s(over 2 decades old). I still have E-mail messages from around that time (I seldom need to look at these though) and I dread the idea of losing them without realising this (due to disk/surface/storage device corruption). I've long made regular backups and generally do my best to keep separate copies on separate devices. I wrote a number of lengthy articles about it last month when I purchased a 8TB "spinning rust" HDD.

One recurring theme in those articles was the durability and "endurance" of various modalities, if that's even the right term to use (it is not). I don't trust SSDs, I generally have a good experience with CD-ROMs (all the ones I have from the 90s still seem to work flawlessly; some contain backups of my 90s files).

Floppy disks are magnetic. I still have some diskettes lying about. I no longer have a device that can read those.

We generally need to reject this dumb notion that "old" means bad. The companies that push this narrative stand to gain from selling us more and "new" as in recently-patented (i.e. more expensive) stuff.

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