OK, so in the course of organizing the apartment, I’m looking through some boxes that haven’t been gone through in a few years.

And I find a stack of 3.5″ floppy disks labeled “C: Drive Backup, 10/1/1994, Norton Backup Format”

Let me run my thought process down for you, as it went.

First, these floppy disks are 14 years old, and they’re “Pengo” brand. Not exactly premium media. The data on them is probably pretty far from readable anymore.

Second, Norton Backup used a proprietary format that relied on a custom compression scheme to pack as much data as possible on to each floppy. No other backup software is going to be able to restore the contents of these disks.

Third, even if someone was digging through the trash, happened to find these disks, happened to have a copy of Norton Backup lying around AND the disks were still readable – what are the odds that any piece of personal data from 1994 is in the least bit still sensitive?

I STILL spent several minutes breaking every one of them in half before throwing them away.

That’s paranoia for ya.