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.

My father would womanize, he would drink, he would make outrageous claims like he invented the question mark. Some times he would accuse chestnuts of being lazy, the sort of general malaise that only the genius possess and the insane lament. My childhood was typical, summers in Rangoon, luge lessons. In the spring we’d make meat helmets. When I was insolent I was placed in a burlap bag and beaten with reeds, pretty standard really. At the age of 12 I received my first scribe. At the age of fourteen, a Zoroastrian woman named Vilma ritualistically shaved my testicles. There really is nothing like a shorn scrotum, it’s breathtaking, I suggest you try it.
Chicken pot pie!…Chocolate-covered raisins!…Ehh…Glazed ham!…Heh…heh…heh…they think I’m CRAZY. But I know better. It is not *I* who am crazy. It is not I who am MAD! Didn’tcha hear ’em? Didn’tcha see the CROWDS? Oh my beloved ice cream bar…how I love to lick your creamy center! HOOOWWWWWW….and your oh-so-nutty chocolate covering! You’re not like the others…you like the same things I do! Waxed paper…boiled football leather…dog breath…We’re not hitchhiking anymore! We’re RIDING!






