Please read this page if you have a reason to store your data on your own removable media (floppy disks, CD-R's, Zip disks, etc.). In what follows we offer some guidelines on which media are appropriate for short, medium, and long-term storage.

Floppy disk (short)

We do NOT recommend saving data to floppy disks for any purpose other than very short-term storage or data transfer. Floppy disks are subject to corruption by external magnetic fields. Furthermore, they have a bad habit of not working on drives other than the one on which they were originally formatted.

Zip disk (short)

Zip disks are more reliable than floppy disks and have a strong protective shell. However, they are still a purely magnetic media and so are subject to external magentic fields.

CD-R (CD-Recordable) (medium-long)

CD-Rs are optical and so are not subject to external magnetic fields. While there is some controversy over their longevity, several of the major CD-R manufacturers claim that their top-of-the line CD-Rs will last at least 50-100 years when stored and handled properly. For a guide to long-term preservation of data on CD's and DVD's, you can read the NIST's publication Care and Handling of CDs and DVDs - A Guide for Librarians and Archivists (or here is a local copy). Here is a summary of some of the portions of that report that are particularly important. In early 2005 the NIST subjected CD-Rs and DVD-Rs to light and heat/humidty abuse; here is a quick summary. If you want to read the complete report, here is the original paper (and a local copy).

DVD-R (DVD-Recordable) (medium-long)

This is a relatively new technology and information on its archival properties is scarce. However, as the data density on a DVD-R is larger than a CD-R, it is to be expected that DVD-Rs will be more "fragile" than CD-Rs.

Memory key/Flash Drive (short)

Memory keys currently store anywhere from 8 to 512MB of data. However, they are not intended for long-term storage, but rather for transferring data from one place to another.