The future of DOS is quite frankly limited to three things:

So we need to know how to back up the two products, since the 3-1/2 inch floppies will not last forever.

The easiest way to back up MS-DOS is to temporarily install it, using C:\DOS as the folder for all your command files. Don't forget to then make a system floppy using the command SYS A:. Then either upgrade your system to Windows-9X OR install Windows-NT4 on a separate partition OR install Linux in its own space. When you do any of the three you'll have an OS capable of burning CDs (with an appropriate CDR or CDRW drive). Then you can copy the files from the DOS-6.X floppy you created to the C:\DOS directory

Next copy all the Windows diskettes to a C:\W31SETUP directory which you will create. Then you can burn a CD containing the directories C:\DOS and C:\W31SETUP (use the CD creator option to create CDs capable of being shared with other computers so that your files are 8.3 compliant and readable in DOS)

Just to be sure, shut the computer down to MSDOS mode, make sure DOS can recognize the CDROM drive (Click here if DOS can't recognize the drive) and be sure you can read the files.

One of the nice things about doing this is that now you can install Windows-3.1x whenever you need to quickly and easily by simply copying the W31SETUP directory from the CDROM to your hard drive and running setup from that directory -- MANY TIMES FASTER THAN USING DISKETTES!

But the real critical question is: how do I back up the ability to boot DOS itself? For this you have to do one of three things: