Most of us were using Zip drives to backup our files and then put the disks on shelf. There was no cloud backup, and 100MB was often enough for all your personal files.

It was also used by professional who needed to transfer large (for the times) amounts of data but not so much or without the technical background that high density tapes or routinely swapping hard drives was sensible (or possible): images, document scans, …

this. IIRC the internal drive plus two disks being significantly cheaper than an external hard drive of similar capacity