Anybody Still use Zip Drives for anything?

[yellowdagger]

I like Zip Drives/Disks yet I personally haven't found enough reasons to use them.

Aside of their natural faultiness they seem to be good for transferring large files to older dos machines without wasting floppies or spending time on floppies and sometimes backing up large images/cad/Photoshop files when standard usbs seem to easily lost in your pocket or hard to store/archive.

Do you see any uses for them or anything of this sort?

[KO Gilligan]

I suppose they are still useful in Legacy systems. They were great for system restore because they were bootable, and good for quick back-up of files. There was also 120MB SuperDisk. Any system back-up and storage solution on modern machines would be better off using flash drives or optical media. I remember this discussion like about 10 years ago and the price of flash storage was still high enough that zip drives were a viable alternative.

That being said, all media storage is vulnerable. Although the technical specifications have flash memory lasting hundreds of years and hundreds of thousands of writes, I'm a skeptic. You need a back up plan.

Flash drives are a little more reliable than those clunky mechanical zips and floppies, but we've all plugged one in one day and got that flash drive "Drive not recognized" error, or had a corrupt file... moisture, magnetics, and environmental factors are still an issue with flash drives,
and they also mysteriously die - albeit not as dramatic as the death of a zip or floppy drive swishing and clicking and thrashing - those were the good-ol' days

[Dopefish7590]

I haven't used anything older than an old Windows 98 box I had laying around in ages. ZIP disks were cool when they served a purpose of being able to transfer large quantities of files between DOS and old Windows systems... But they never really caught on.

If you only want to use ZIP disks to copy files to a DOS machine you should consider virtualization, it would mean you won't have to work with old hardware, and you can do everything on your own computer... I mean like right now using things like VMWare Player or VirtualBox to use DOS on your system without having to install it directly on your disk. (Without using an emulator like DOSBox)

I even recorded a video showing you how to do it with VMWare... (Though I have Workstation, so there will be some subtle differences.)

You can get various versions of DOS from here...

Edit: It looks like MS doesn't even care about DOS in the least, so I can just put up a link to a working VM... Here you go..! You can mount the disk with VMWare to add files to it. (Like games or old legacy programs that aren't 100% working with DOSBox)

[8IronBob]

I agree, nothing like having it be 1993 all over again without having to install it clean just by virtualizing it. If only my super old laptop would still work, I'd love to install DOS 5.0 on it, and play all sorts of Duke 3D, Quake, and Doom Series in its native roots in DOS. Heck, I can actually play BLOOD on that! YEAH!