I've always had trouble with that myself. I can't bring myself to waste a CD when it's only 5MB worth of data. I know they're cheap, but it still bothers me at some level. CD-RW's would seem like a great idea, but I have a bad history with RW's somehow becoming unrecoverable coasters, and I no longer trust them enough to buy them.
At one point, I tried getting a Zip drive setup going... I had found some drives at the local thrift store, and some disks, and it seemed like the perfect solution. However, I had a ton of trouble getting any of it working (possibly due to the infamous click of death, though I'm still not entirely sure). I've since found a few different mechanisms that might make things a bit easier, but past experience has really soured me on the idea.
At another point, I put a USB add-in card into the computer, but getting USB working under DOS is a nightmare in itself. Most of the tools available are geared towards using USB hard drives, and generally don't do anything other than USB mass storage. At the time, I had no USB flash drives, but was trying to get things working with an SD card reader. It's USB mass storage, right? Shouldn't be much different from a hard drive, right? Well all I managed to accomplish was corrupting the file system on the SD card, and wasting tons of conventional memory on USB drivers.
What I usually do is use the "split" command in Unix to break large files up into 1.4MB pieces, which I then take to the other computer on floppy disks. Once I have all the pieces, the DOS copy command can be used to recombine them. Not a particularly fun way of doing things, but at least it feels less wasteful.
If none of those options appeal to you (which I would certainly understand!), you could always connect the DOS machine to your modern PC via the network. Set up an FTP server on your PC and use an FTP client on the DOS machine to copy the files over. Internet software for DOS can be a little dicey (and lord help you if you try it in Win 3.1), but you'd be surprised at how many ethernet card manufacturers still offer DOS drivers for their cards. I keep planning to do this some day, but my DOS machine is in the basement while the rest of my network is on the main floor, which causes some problems.
--Zero
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