Think your CDROM backups are safe? So did Tom Gromak at the Detroit News:
Cheap optical storage devices like writeable and rewriteable CDs, it predicted, were going to revolutionize the way we store and share and retrieve everything. Among the casualties: Floppy disks, ZIP drives, file cabinets and folders.
I remember buying into that argument when I shelled out hundreds of dollars years ago for my first rewriteable CD drive. I quickly, and blindly, moved many megabytes of documents — articles I had written, digital photos and scans of photos, audio snippets of my daughter, etc. And all those obsolete printouts went into file 13. My information was safe and sound, and I could sleep better.
So, as I re-read that old magazine, I wondered: Where were all those old documents? It didn’t take long to find the series of rewriteable discs I had used to save them (I had used rewriteable discs so I could update some of the works without ending up with duplicate versions of the files). I popped the CD-RW into my PC with the same expectation one gets when cracking open a time capsule. And I got — I got — nothing but a Windows error message offering to format the unformatted disc in my PC.
Everything I had saved, everything I had disposed of because it was supposedly safe, was gone.
This is why I not only backup important data to CDROM, but also to a dedicated large-capacity hard drive.
