Recently, I inadvertently launched a particularly nasty viral assault on my office desktop computer. What I quickly and painstakingly discovered, was that this virus not only cleaned out my hard drive, but also followed the data stream back to our server and wiped out the entire back-up data as well. I’m not an overtly technical person, so I never even imagined this was a possibility. I assumed that once you create a back-up file away from the primary computer, the files would be safe. To my chagrin, I couldn’t have been more wrong.

The saving grace in this case, was that our company, in its infinite wisdom, also keeps a hard copy of all back-up files from our server on optical discs. Optical discs (like DVD (especially archival grade) or Blu-ray) are the only true back-up solutions that are impervious to viral attacks, accidental or deliberate deletion, hacking, etc. If we didn’t have the foresight to use optical discs to back up our back-up, I would have completely lost nearly 8 years’ worth of painstakingly laborious content including reports, pictures, proposals, templates, email history, and so much more.

I thought, what if this happened to my home computer where I don’t have the back-up systems in place I have at work. All of my family photos and videos would be gone forever. Irreplaceable memories wiped out with a single keystroke. That is not something that you can put a price tag on, or could even be replaced for that matter. I went home and backed up my entire hard drive’s irreplaceable files, especially the pictures and videos on our new archival M-Disc media. I dodged a bullet this time, will you be so lucky?