But the appraisal business has changed somewhat. Users now need to bundle together not only the main report data, but also color photographs, building sketches, location maps, a digital signature and maybe one or more scanned documents. Although we compress the information as much as possible, the typical appraisal file is now 300 kilobytes or larger. Not only can you fit much fewer reports on a single diskette, but the time required to read and write 300K from a floppy disk is much too slow to make it the ideal media for storing reports. Additionally, a good hard drive is rated to last 500,000 hours or more.
Floppy diskettes are considerably more prone to errors.
If you'd like to maintain periodic backups of your reports, and not have to clutter your hard drive with reports from the last several years, you can use the HighPerForm Office Archive to copy reports to a removable drive or a secondary hard drive. However, because of the size of the typical appraisal report, you would be best advised to invest in an Iomega ZIP drive or similar device. Copyright 2000 United Systems Incorporated. All rights reserved.