Floppies Often Fail
Floppy disks are the least dependable means of data storage. They are easily contaminated by dust, and tend to fail over time. They should never be used as your primary data storage. Floppies should only be used to store a backup copy of data or to transport data from one machine to another.
Floppy Performance Penalty
Reading from and writing to a floppy disk is incredibly slow compared to a hard drive. In fact, reading from and writing to floppies is one of the slowest operations you can ask your machine to do. For safety reasons, Observer does a lot of saving as you work, which you won't especially notice when the data is saved to the hard drive. However, once you switch your data location to a floppy, you will seriously degrade the performance of the program, and you will definitely notice some lags as the program pauses to save data.
Floppy Space Limits
Floppy disks hold very little data. Although your data might start out fitting on a floppy, you may run out of room as you create and sync observations.
Working From Flash Drives
It is also not recommended that you use a flash drive as your primary data location. Although flash drives are faster and possibly more reliable than floppy disks, they too are relatively easy to corrupt or damage. Like floppies, they are fine for keeping a backup or for transporting data from one machine to another, but please do not use them as your primary data source.