Actually, I'm not so sure my floppies are all in great shape. I have run into bad floppies of other material. But I know the stuff on my hard drive is OK and I periodically copy it over onto new directories, and every day I also add that day's entry to my floppies. Maybe I should do a complete backup periodically onto floppies, not just continue to add floppies to the accumulation. Better, I should get off my butt and run off a paper version, as sooner or later most hard drives crash. Somewhat akin is a trend that absolutely horrifies me, as a newspaper reporter. Some of the world's biggest repositories of bound newspaper volumes have been dumping theirs in favor of microfilm because it takes up less storage space. Microfilm not only deteriorates much faster than old cloth-based paper, but it also can't record details as well. A New Yorker magazine article in 2000 compared a wonderful drawing published in a newspaper around 1900 (if I remember it correctly) with the version on microfilm. Maybe compared isn't the right word, because there was no comparison! The original was crisp, subtle and beautiful while the new version was a muddy mess. A lot of our heritage is being lost. -- Joe