Floppy Disks backups are one of the most cost effective methods of backing up. A standard floppy disk costs around 80 cents* each and almost all PCs come with an inbuilt floppy drive (the hardware that reads floppy disks). A floppy will hold 1.4 megabytes of information but you can obtain very cheap programs which will allow you to compress (zip) large amounts of information which enable you to back up files on floppy.

If you are only able to backup to floppy discs, I'd suggest that you use them to back up your data files, that is anything you create on your computer, letters, emails and the like. Then if a corruption occurs you can take the Back Up Copy and reload it over the top of corrupted data on your computer. As many operating systems are very large and you'd need something in the vicinity of 100 floppy discs of zip files to back up the entire system, it you may be best to reinstall the operating system from the original discs that came with your computer if your operating system becomes corrupted and use the floppies only for backing up your data files.

To compress files for backup onto a floppy disc (or to email), you can alter, & combine, a number of files, of any type, into a Zip File. That is a file which ends with the suffix .zip and occupies less space than the combined total of the files within it. Once a file has been altered to zip format, it can be opened by any program that handles zip files. The files do not have to be opened by the same zip program that created them.

PKZIP^® and WINZIP^® are two of the most accessible and affordable zip programs currently available. WINZIP^® is shareware so the registered version costs money where PKZIP^® is freeware but more difficult to use.