zip drives

[norco]

i'm new at the pc game and would like to back-up my drive. zip disks interest me, but if used do i need a drive to enable same? if so, want do you recommend?

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norm

[Rick]

Zip drives come in two flavors. 100 and 250 meg
Unless you intend to invest a lot of Money in Zip disks you may want to find another backup system (If you intend to backup the complete hard drive)

The drive itself will cost you between $79 and $200
the disks However run about $10 each for the 100 meg
And $13 each for the 250 meg disks

Too back up 1 Gig you are looking at 5 or 10 disks depending on the drive you get.
They are also known to be slow.

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To ERR is HUMAN
To REALLY screw things UP, YOU NEED a COMPUTER !

[steveo]

As rick pointed out going zip can become a costly endevour. Here in Canada I'm paying no less than 20 and up to 30 bucks for one disk....ouch! Add to that zip disks can get bad sectors like thier smaller floppy counterparts. I have a internal 100 zip drive which was a viable alternative for me because my pc didn't really have the speed/ram to run a cd-rw. Now that I have a much powerful pc a cd-rw is the way to go. So I use the zip drive like I would a floppy drive these days but that's it.

You can get zip drives in both internal/external and Iomega is the only one I've used on both counts and has never given me any problems.

[ErnieK]

Hi there norco
As has been stated by Rick and Steveo zip disks are expensive, (here in the UK in the region of £9.00 each. With the drives costing about £80.00 for the 100MB external drive). Where they come into their own, in my case, is for storing driver updates etc. They are also handy if you want an easy way of transfer in files between computers in different locations. For backing up your computer I would not recomend, but I would not be without mine for other things. The Iomega software has a lot of, in my opinion, usless guff in it. I just put in the basic drivers and any time I want to defrag\scandisk a zip disk I install the appropriate Iomega software then uninstal it afterwards. (running MS scandisk\defrag on a zip disk is NOT recommended)If you can afford it, I would suggest looking for a cheap
CD-RW drive for storing backups.

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Ernie

[steveo]

Ernie: I agree about the software. I never use it and instead let windows load whatever driver it needs to run the ZD like it does the floppy. It seems like your uses for the ZD and mine are pretty much the same. Thanks for mentioning the ms defrag/scandisk tip...I'll keep that in mind from here on in.

[norco]

Originally posted by Rick:
Zip drives come in two flavors. 100 and 250 meg
Unless you intend to invest a lot of Money in Zip disks you may want to find another backup system (If you intend to backup the complete hard drive)

The drive itself will cost you between $79 and $200
the disks However run about $10 each for the 100 meg
And $13 each for the 250 meg disks

Too back up 1 Gig you are looking at 5 or 10 disks depending on the drive you get.
They are also known to be slow.

thanks rick: can you detail alternatives to zips ?




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norm