Zip Disks – A One-Shot Public-Service Announcement

Remember these? How long has it been since you stored important files– especially photos– on Zip disks? It’s been three decades for me, since higher-capacity CD-R media showed up in the mid 1990s.

Just this week, while searching for something else in our furnace/storage room, I rediscovered the box where I stuffed my Iomaga drive and dozens of disks. All holding image files from my earliest photo exhibits.

And they still do. I connected the Iomega drive to my Windows 10 laptop, the computer recognized it, the disks worked perfectly, and I quickly reclaimed my files. Like a Noah’s Ark, the little 100MB Zips preserved files I thought I’d lost over decades of PC crashes, floods and lightning storms.

Microsoft has given PC owners an October 25th “deadline” to install Windows 11 on machines that can handle it. (See a recent UPDATE below.) So if you still have a Zip drive and disks, do they hold images (or other files) that you want? They’re probably still there. And while we can’t assume they’ll remain accessible under Windows 11, I think they probably will.

This whole Windows issue seems moot for me. Though my Lenovo Legion Y720 laptop is only about 7 years old, Microsoft’s W11-compatibility-checking tool says I can’t upgrade because its Intel Core i7-7700 HQ CPU is incompatible. I don’t think I can do much about that. So for now, I’ll stick with W10 until it becomes obvious that I need to shift this machine to Linux/Ubuntu (a process that has worked well for me on other notebooks).

UPDATE: I just received a Microsoft notice that Windows 10 systems are “no longer receiving support or free software updates after Cctober 14, 2025.” Based on the company’s past behavior, though, I still don’t believe they will stop ALL updates to W10 that soon. After all, one of Microsoft’s 2024 alerts about this deadline said that it would also spell the end of updates to operating systems going as far back as Windows 7! Really? So might W10 still receive at least a FEW critical updates for years to come? 

–Dave Powell is a Westford, Mass., writer and avid amateur photographer.

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