A zip drive. By Morn, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/?curid=30135961n.a portable device for reading and writing zip disks, manufactured by Iomega and released in 1994Burckel 2008, 9–10Despite its dominance as an issue twenty years ago, preservation still occupies only about 5% of archivists’ efforts. This is somewhat surprising, given the rapid change from paper to electronic records and the even more rapid change in the storage medium for digital information (e.g., floppy disks, zip drives, CD-ROMS, and hard drives) and the evolution of software needed to read the information.Reside 2010, 20A swappable Zip drive could be purchased for the machine, an Ethernet port allowed data to be transferred from the computer using standard networking protocols, and PCMCIA slots permitted the addition of USB ports through a third-party card to which an external hard drive, or even flash media, could be attached.Burgess 2017Our digital preservation colleagues at Archives New Zealand kindly provided us with some Zip Disks to test the Zip Drive, but this unfortunately failed. We will now consider whether we should try and source a working one, repair the existing one or look at other options.
Notes
The term zip drive is sometimes used synonymously with zip disk; however, the drive is the device that reads and writes to the disk. Zip drives can be used in digital forensics workstations to read obsolete media.
A zip drive. By Morn, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/?curid=30135961
n.
a portable device for reading and writing zip disks, manufactured by Iomega and released in 1994