LOL. I actually tell my classes when I teach Computer Basics about the days when installing Microsoft Office 4.2 meant repeating the “insert disk, click OK, wait, eject disk” sequence about 40 times.
Add Tape Drives for 12 cents per gig.
Deciding on a backup solution depends on many things.
Cost, transfer rates, ease of recovering data, durability and so on all figure in to it.
Online solutions are nice although if you have a dead computer and need to pull 500GB of data back to a new PC over the internet you will be waiting literally days to get your stuff back. Not everyone can afford such a delay.
There really is no better or worse to this. Only what makes the most sense for you. Each data storage method has its good and not so good points.
I remember doing that with Novell Netware. Installing meant watching the little flipper spin waiting to insert the next disk. It was sloooow but not so slow you could really do much of anything else. Just had to sit and feed it disks for hours on end.
So you get to disk 38 or so and Windows 3.1 or good ol’ Dos 5 tells you that it can’t read from the disk?
That really sucked.
That’s why you were supposed to make backups of every disk before you tried to install anything. If your disk was bad, you’d go get the original. Now if the original was bad…