<p>H and I have quite the collection of these things, but I don’t think we have had a computer that can read them in about ten years. Is there any reason I would not want to just toss them? Mostly they have old grad school papers but they do have some somewhat personal stuff–resumes and fellowship application letters, for example . . .</p>
<p>LOL - about an hour ago, I threw out about 10 of these (I’m de-cluttering my office). I took off the metal strip and then twisted or otherwise destroyed the discs. They’re still sitting in the garbage bag next to my desk at this very moment, so if someone else has a better idea…</p>
<p>Great minds! I wish I could say our stash was even in the office . . . I am cleaning out boxes full of old odds and ends from the guest room closet . . .</p>
<p>Wow, so many CCers are doing the same thing! I thought about powering up the old 486 beast (:eek:) that we still have just to see if there is anything of value on the disks that DH has been keeping in boxes of old rubbish in our guest bedroom closet, but then I decided against it… 
The trash can is FULL.</p>
<p>If you don’t know what’s on there, then you won’t miss it. Toss it.</p>
<p>The last time I bought these is for a class my son had in an engineering course where they had a piece of equipment that wrote circuit stuff on to floppies. So he had to use three out of a box of ten. I have the rest in a box in the basement and I’m seriously thinking of tossing them. We have old floppies in a floppy tray too - I should probably copy them onto one of my more recent systems and just store them on an external drive and dump all of the floppies. I have five working systems that will read and write floppies and maybe it is a good time to clean up that old technology out of the house.</p>
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<p>That’s what I’m currently working on but I have * huge* box of cords and misc. accessories that go to computers, phones, cd players, ipods, video players, TVs, dsl adapters, cameras, video recorders, game consoles, etc…etc…etc. What a pain to go through! In the future, I need to do a much better job of labeling these items. Recently, I have started putting all the accessories to each new electronic device we get into its own quart-size baggie and labeling it but I still have 10 years worth of old stuff to cull. :(</p>
<p>I just tossed a box with 100 cassette tapes. The only cassette tape player we still have in the house in the one in H’s truck - LOL. Seriously, at this point, if I don’t know where a thingy belongs to - I throw it away. Chances are, if it has been sitting at the bottom of a pile of old cords, etc. for so long, it will not be missed.
I even found a 5-inch floppy which I’m keeping - just for fun.</p>
<p>That stuff is garbage right along with all the games that won’t run on the current DOS. We have a ton of those from before our kids were in college. Time for the trash.</p>
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<p>Freddie Fish! Four-year-old D loved that game and it is the only old game that I have kept. </p>
<p>As for the old discs, H put them in a ziplock bag and took a big hammer to them. He said he didn’t want anyone to be able to access what was on them, but I think he just enjoyed smashing them.</p>
<p>Well, one could just reformat them if a system with a floppy drive were still available. A very strong electromagnet should also do the job. We have one of these at the office for bulk erasing the contents on disk drives.</p>
<p>I’ve got a P4 Intel Windows machine and I still use floppies for very brief documents. I purchased a box of 30 floppies about three years ago and didn’t open it until recently. I just can’t see wasting a 600mb CD-R disk on a few MSWord documents, like resumes, letters, etc. Maybe I’m just stubborn. I have a functioning Zip Drive too.</p>
<p>Coasters!! Something to level that wobbly chair leg. A straight-edge for a short line. A new game – “House of Floppies” (like a house of cards…but louder when it falls!). Okay…it’s junk, toss it (although, for sentimental reasons, I do refuse to throw away the disk that has a copy of my Master’s thesis on it…even though I have a bound copy of the thing…and the degree!).</p>
<p>My wife crochets some sort of thingy (technical term) around them and turns them into coasters. The floppy is totally inside and makes it nice and rigid.</p>
<p>^^ Zip drive… ha! All of mine died from the Click of Death many many moons ago. Can’t believe you have one that still works.</p>
<p>I think a magnet will erase them if it’s strong enough. You could run one over them and then toss them. Or mail them all to LakeWashington. :)</p>
<p>I actually still use the 3 inch. I’m a court reporter, and my machine has a 3 inch disk drive that the jobs write on to. I had to buy an external floppy drive for my latest computer to read them. I love them, though, because I can label each disk as to what job is on it, and it is a great filing system for me to be able to keep track of my work. I back up my final copy once the job is done onto a flash drive, but with no place to label on the outside, I have no idea what’s on there! So, I never erase my hard drive! </p>
<p>I agree with one of the posters, I don’t want to waste a whole CD on one file. The 3 inchers used to be about 20 cents apiece when ordered online. I put a label on them with the job name, and put them in a box. </p>
<p>Now, I can’t find blank 3 inch disks anymore, and when I do, it’s a high price for only a box of 10!</p>
<p>As for hoarding electronics, don’t get me started. Husband just purchased a storage unit just to house his old electronics. Everything is neatly labeled in boxes on shelves he built himself. </p>
<p>Of course, I can’t get him to run a vacuum cleaner at home, but his electronics are his pampered babies.</p>
<p>Three inch floppies embedded in some sort of epoxy or other polymeric resin might make amusing tiles. :)</p>
<p>Well color me inspired. I’ve been cleaning out random drawers/corners/surfaces the last couple of weekends. (Yesterday included a drawer that by the papers had not been cleaned out in. . . um. . . five years.) Not sure why–it’s like spring cleaning has hit early. I cleaned off my home office desk last weekend but left the pile of wee floppies. I do not craft so into the garbage they go!</p>
<p>(And don’t worry–I’m sure the urge will have passed well before spring. 
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<p>Thanks for the love, Fendergirl.</p>
<p>Montegut, use your search engine for “floppy” or “3.5 inch” and you should find an online retailer that sells floppies for peanuts.</p>
<p>And y’all please pray that I will be spared from the feared Zip drive ‘Click of Death.’ Truth is, I don’t buy Zip Disks because they’re ridiculously more costly than flash drives. I continue to use the Zip Drive solely because, being the procrastinator I am, I had a few un-opened and essentially new Zip Disks laying around.</p>
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Look on eBay, you can find them for 10 or 15 cents a piece (and that includes shipping).</p>
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You are living on borrowed time. I think I had something like 4 of them go bad. Make sure you aren’t keeping anything on them that isn’t backed up somewhere else.</p>