“He was actually crying on the phone,” Fitzgerald recalls. “He had lost two disks. And he was willing to pay $20,000 to get data off them. His job was on the line.
“I’ve had disk crashes myself,” Fitzgerald says, discussing his off-hours work on his micro. “I was developing a small game similar to Space Invaders. I lost power on my computer and about three hours of work. I ignored one of my basic rules, which is to back up about every 20 lines—make a copy on a second disk.” Captain Zap’s rule is, “Every fifteen minutes, save on both disks.” That’s extreme. Like all forms of security, apply this in relation to the trouble it would take to recover a loss.
Even Paul Lutus, famous in the industry for his work developing Apple software, has a scary crash story.[[58]]
He’d toiled to develop a new program, of which he took two copies to the company. An electronic glitch cost him one of the copies. The sun melted the other. It seems that Steve Jobs, an Apple cofounder, had put the disk under the windshield of his car. “I ended up very carefully prying apart the case of Jobs’s copy and switching the floppy disk inside to another case so we could recover the programs,” Lutus says. “I haven’t always been so lucky.... For me the biggest drawback to personal computing is the quality of the mass storage. I dislike floppy disks intensely.”
Here’s how you can help your floppies and data survive threats more immediate—sloppiness and stupidity:
1. Zealously enforce a no-drinking, no-eating policy around disks, at least if trouble develops.
2. Remember the Rothman Dirt Domino Theory. Dirt, dust, and grease often can sneak up on your floppies indirectly, in stages. You start with clean hands. Then, however, they fall domino style when you touch a dirty table or one with your office mate’s submarine-sandwich drippings. You return to your own desk briefly before you yourself leave for lunch. You don’t work with floppies then, and you wash your hands after eating, but during your brief stop at your desk before lunch, you’ve already left a trace of grease behind, anyway. Your disk box picks it up when you set it on the wrong spot on the desk. Then, working with the floppies, you lay one atop the box. Now the disk itself fails. Alas, most disk failures aren’t gradual like a recording that gets progressively noisier until you can’t stand to listen to it anymore—they tend to be sudden and total.
3. Realize that floppies don’t always mix well with office materials that correct errors the old-fashioned way—erasers, for instance, white-out fluid, or that unavoidably flaky correction tape.
4. Know about other natural enemies of floppies or at least of the data on them. Beware of airport metal detectors. A disk maker says this isn’t a problem; but don’t gamble, since a magnetic detector, misadjusted, might still mush your data. Beware, too, of telephones atop disks: the magnets in them are powerful.
5. Don’t even let your floppies rest against your computer’s screen, which, like a television’s, can be full of static electricity, attracting dust.