Iomega Adds New Zip to Portable Disks

by Jim Bray

The company most famous for portable disk drives like the Zip disk has come up with an interesting new idea.

Zip disks have been around forever, and they're an excellent way to either archive your files or transport them between locations. The latter use has been particularly handy for contractors who work in more than one place, because they can take their data files with them from job to job, or between their home office and the remote site.

I've used Zip disks for this type of application myself, and love their portability - though my 100 Meg disks are getting a little small for some of the Really Big Files I sometimes have to use. Fortunately, there are 250 Meg Zip disks that will help that situation.

Anyway, the advent of portable hard drives must be giving the Zip disk a run for your money by now. After all, other than the price of admission, there's a lot of incentive to have 10 gigabytes or more of portable storage space than a "mere" 250 Meg. This could affect Iomega's continued sales of Zip technology unless it finds a way to make Zip drives and disks more attractive.

And, like good capitalists, Iomega isn't just sitting back and letting its market dry up. The company is now pushing something called Active Disk technology which has the potential to give the old Zip disk a whole new lease on life.

Active Disk software runs automatically from a Zip disk, without an installation utility, once you install the Active Disk technology itself (which is painless). Not only is this convenient, it's clean. Typical installation processes add system files, change the system's registry, and permanently copy the application to the computer's hard drive.

Well, as permanently as anything with computers, which seem to be among the most loyal supporters of Murphy's Law.

The Active Disk-enabled software runs instantly and automatically when the Zip disk is inserted into a PC, and disappears from the computer when the disk is ejected, leaving no trace, no clutter and no personal information on the hard drive.

Sounds almost subversive, doesn't it?

What this means to you is that instead of merely taking your data files with you, you can take the entire application as well, so you don't need separate installations on each PC you're using.

It also means you could run your software at a colleague's desk or in a client's office.

The big problem right now is a lack of software. You can't merely stick Microsoft Word, for example, onto a Zip disk and then flit like a butterfly happily between your various venues. Most of the fifty-something Active Disk titles now available are of the utilitarian or gaming variety, though Iomega claims over 200 developers are building software to exploit the technology.

One program is an Active Disk-powered Windows XP Moving Tool that's supposed to help you move your files and settings from an older system to a new Windows XP system in as few as two steps. I'm already on XP, so didn't try this one, but I did try out a different application.

It was an Active Disk version of Mah Jong; I stuck it on an Active Disk-enabled Zip disk, and can happily say that the system seems to work as advertised, though as of this writing I haven't had a chance to try it on a different computer with a zip drive.

Unfortunately, this particular game also inflicts an annoying "Please Buy Me" advertising screen from the game's manufacturer when you close a session, and this is enough to turn you off the technology - even though the technology isn't at fault. I guess it's proof that, since there was no charge for the download, there really is no such thing as a free lunch.

Still, it proves that the technology can work, and it's a pretty good idea.

Other software currently available for the PC platform includes PowerDesk Utilities, "a suite of Explorer enhancing utilities," LifeWorks Photo Album (to help organize, print, and share your digital images), Typic Master (a typing tutor/tester), and Legacy Family Tree (billed as fully featured family history software).

What's really needed is the abovementioned MS Word version, or something comparable, as well as Active Disk versions of other major productivity applications. That would be extremely handy and would encourage consumers to look at Zip disks as self-contained units in much the same way floppy disks were in the early years of the personal computer.

Jim Bray's technology columns are distributed by the TechnoFILE and Mochila Syndicates. Copyright Jim Bray.

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