6. Remember that the more information you can pack on a floppy, the more vulnerable it may be to damage from dirt, fingerprints, magnetic fields, and other causes.
7. Clean your disk heads. Don’t use rubbing alcohol. “Try something like a Freon-based material with 91 percent pure alcohol,” Fitzgerald says. “You can get it at some computer stores.” Or, after every twenty hours of operation, use a cleaning diskette, three of which typically come in a $15 package. Each disk, says Fitzgerald, will last about thirty cleanings.
8. Have head alignment checked, to reduce disk errors. With heads out of whack, your machine may be the only one that can read your disks—not even identical machines. A crude way of assuring proper alignments, in fact, might be to see if other machines can read disks written on your micro.
9. Buy quality disks. Of course, the more you spend on disks, the more expensive your backups become—discouraging you from making them. Find a balance between cost and convenience that suits your security needs.
Timing—that’s the secret to saving your electronic diamonds or rhinestones on your floppies, whatever the quality.
In the past, working just with paper, timing meant to me nothing more than the Rothman Chronological Method. The newer the document on my desk, the closer it would be to the top of the file. It wasn’t the most efficient way. But I rarely lost material, just temporarily misplaced it. Computerizing, however, I worried.
“Floppies are treacherous,” my friend Michael Canyes said like a John Bircher discussing commies. “They always trick you when you least expect it.”
“Thanks,” I said. “The way you’re encouraging me to computerize, I’m beginning to think you actually want to sabotage me. Help me lose my manuscripts and all that.”
“Just back up your copy page or so,” Michael said.
“Isn’t that a lot of trouble?”