He calls on a Computer Services staff member. There's nothing we can do to recover the data. If you're really lucky, they may have been able to salvage some of the text of the file, in bits and pieces. But I've spent weeks on this paper, and it's due in 15 minutes. The Computer Services people suggest that you open your backup copy of the file and work from there.
Floppy disks are a relatively unreliable storage device.
They are fairly cheap and highly susceptible to damage from spills, fingerprints, dust, heat and magnetic fields. Despite these flaws, floppy disks are still the most widely used portable storage device for both PCs and Macs. If you rely on floppy disks to store your data, you really should be concerned about them failing you, usually at the most inconvenient moment. What You Can Do Because of the weaknesses of floppy disks, you should never use a floppy disk to store the only copy of your files. If you are working on a file that's stored on your hard drive, periodically save another copy of it onto a floppy disk.