I wasn’t justifying the old platform. I was suggesting a modern implementation for magnetic storage that’s safer than portable hard drives.
But I will justify it not that you asked. Easy, the systems are old and don’t support modern sized drives or the interfaces. No USB. No eSATA. (reasonable) way to use a flash stick. Definitely not a modern external drive.
Zip disks are supported on every system I have since the mid 90s, including an old ZDS and Leading Edge system; to my current BSD box and my Mac Studio. Only other peripheral storage that flexible is CDs, and writing 100MB to a 1x cdr is slower than a Zip disk.
