Besides this emergency diskette, always keep your operating system s installation diskettes or CD-ROM nearby. When repairing damaged files, you will often be prompted for files contained in the installation diskette. The best way to protect irreplaceable data is to back it up. There are two questions to ask when selecting a backup option. Magnetic tape and diskettes have traditionally been the backup media of choice.
Diskettes are cheap and easy to use, but they can hold only a small amount of data.
At the other extreme are tape drives, which can hold gigabytes of data but do not allow immediate access and use. In recent years there has been an explosion of new backup choices. These drives have storage capacities hundreds of times greater than diskettes and are affordable and portable. Zip Plus drive can read disks that hold up to 100 MB of data. To hook the Zip drive to a computer, you can use the parallel port, the printer port, or a SCSI device chain.