WinZIP or PKZip are pretty good, but 10 to 1 compression is extremely rare. If you have any executable files (.exe, .com) you're unlikely to get better than 0.6 to 1 on them, the common .pdf and .tif files hardly compress at all, and .gif and .jpg files are already compressed and don't gain measurably by running them through a zip.

While you can use the zip programs to span floppies, it's (IMO) a very risky procedure for archiving, since damage or loss of any one disk means you can't restore anything much from any of the disks. If you put 14 MB on 10 1.4 MB disks, its 10 times as likely that at least one of the disks will fail, as if you put the whole 14 BM in a single place with the same sort of medium. With the kinds of storage conditions likely in a home environment, no magnetic storage media can be considered a safe place to put stuff away for more than about 3 to 5 years.

I've had poor experience with the 100MB ZIP Drives, although others have done better. IOMEGA had some problems with disk quality a few years back, and a bad disk would "injure" the drive so that it could eat the next few disks you put in it, sometimes in a way that you wouldn't notice the first time, but subsequent use of the damaged disk would show progressive deterioration and loss of data. I'm told they've fixed it all, but "once bit twice shy." I do use a ZIP drive frequently for "temporary" saves of a web page or so, but I don't consider them an archival quality storage.

The basic question, "can files be copied to floppies to get them off the machine?" is a yes. If each individual file is less than the 1.4 MB that a floppy can hold, you can just copy them individually, and put as many as you can fit on each floppy.

If you have a few individual files that are each larger than 1.4 MB, you can use WinZIP or PKZip to "span floppies" to put each file on a "set" of floppies, and if you store the set carefully you'll have a good chance of getting the file back if you want it in the short term. If you have to use disk spanning, you want a separate set for each file, so that you only lose one if a disk doesn't hold up.

If you have files that you really want to save for a fairly long while, the only safe place to put them (that's as safe as leaving them on a hard drive) would be to put them on good quality CDs.

Most of the "major brand" CD manufacturers are quoting believable lifetimes for data storage of 50 years or more. If you go with the "house brand" blanks that some places sell a lot cheaper, you can't, currently, expect better than 5 to 10 years of safe storage. It's also significant that the "majors" recommend that blank CDs be burned within 1 to 3 years of purchase, since the recording layers lose sensitivity before they're burned, and may not "take" new data reliably when they get old, even though they can "hold" the data indefinitely once its there.

If all you have right now is a floppy drive, then by all means consider it safe to copy anything that will fit on them there. Floppies are cheap, and safe enough for about as long as most people need.

If you have more stuff than you can fit on floppies, getting a CD burner, ZIP drive, or a bigger Hard Drive all are workable options, and any of these can be done with about the same budget. If you need to look at one of these options, though, and if your current machine doesn't have any of these fancy gadgets, you should consider that you can probably get a new computer, including one or more of the larger storage media, for about twice (to maybe 4x) the price of adding any one of these options.

If you have space and ports, you could add an internal drive, but there are limits to what you can stuff inside. If you have a USB port on your machine, you could consider an external USB Hard Drive, CD Burner, or ZIP drive, for a very little more than the internal ones. The external ones are very easy to set up, in most cases. If you don't have a USB port, you can get one of those added to an existing machine fairly cheaply ($40 US?) if you have a card slot available.

If you have an older machine and it does have a USB port, you need to check whether its USB or USB-2. If it's the older USB type, it won't support the data rates needed by anything faster than about a 4x speed CD burner. You can probably use a faster burner with it, but you'll have to set it back to a slower speed, so there's no gain in spending more for a drive that's faster than you can use.

John