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Alternatives to Floppy Diskes

Simmons is moving away from floppy disks as a means of exchanging or storing data.  In addition to being out-dated, floppy disks are fairly unreliable and have very limited capacity (1.44MB).  Students and faculty frequently need assistance trying to recover corrupted data from floppies.  So our new office, classroom, delivery, and lab computers will not have floppy drives.

To help with this transition, Technology has portable drives available for loan; faculty may request a floppy drive for classroom delivery; and each lab has a couple of portable drives.

Technology recommends that faculty, staff and students use the following transportation and storage methods, rather than floppies:

Students, faculty, and staff should use their "user" folder on the file server to store and backup documents. Please consult backup tips or call (x2222) or email the Help Desk for assistance.

Faculty should have students submit coursework through WebCT, which ensures the privacy of data, has the capacity for storing large amounts of data, is regularly backed-up, and is available 24/7 from anywhere with an Internet connection. The WebCT "assignments" feature allows faculty to store all of the students' submissions for a given assignment in one place. For assistance, email webct@simmons.edu.

Students, faculty, and staff should consider purchasing a small key-chain USB flash storage device (capacity 16MB - 4 GB) to transport files between locations that do not have access to the Simmons file server. All Simmons public access computers are equipped with USB ports that will accept these drives; almost all office computers are also so equipped.

Students, faculty, and staff should use write-once or rewriteable CDs (650+MB) to give large files to other people. Since the beginning of 2003, all new Simmons computers have been equipped with CD burners.