For me, it must have been 20 years ago in 2005. I got Kingston’s 512MB flash drive for a Christmas present and oh my how great it felt to hold so much of memory in my pocket. After that it was clear to me that there is no use for floppies to me anymore.
Not exactly a floppy, but close: more than 20 years ago a very dear person gave me an Iomega Zip drive and a couple of disks. Game changer. My hard drive was 40 MB, so for the first time my backup was bigger than my computer. Same speed, too, so not much of a sacrifice.
Later came the tiny Clik! disks: great as a music player, and perfect for carrying data around when 100 MB was a HUGE amount of memory. Through all my university years the Zip was my go-to. I just learned to pray every time I heard a click that wasn’t the brand name. :D