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Put a Big File on Little Disks

My files are getting too big to fit on one floppy disk. How can I copy a large file onto multiple floppies?

Edward Wong, via the Internet

No matter how hard we try, we can't completely dispense with floppies--even though their 1.44MB capacity is often too small for a single file.

The best solution is a .zip archive program, such as WinZip Computing's $29 WinZip 8 shareware. It's available from our Downloads library. Virtually all .zip programs let you span an archive across multiple disks. Besides, copying an archive (instead of an uncompressed file) will reduce the number of disks you need.

If you have WinZip, right-click the file you want to copy and select Add to Zip. In the 'Add to archive' field in WinZip's Add dialog box, preface the file name with a:, as in a:bigfile (assuming that you need to span your floppy drive).

As soon as you type a: into that field, WinZip's 'Multiple disk spanning' option will become available. You can leave it on the default Automatic setting. Click OK to start the compression and spanning; the program will prompt you to insert other blank formatted disks as needed.

If you don't want to compress your files or pay $29, you can download Marc Bjorklund's File Splitter freeware, a program that splits large files into multiple smaller files of a specified maximum size (the default is 1.44MB). It also creates a batch file for restoring the original, now-divided file to its united state. You can download File Splitter from our Downloads library.