"Hey Andrew, what's the best way to transfer these files from my old 
laptop to my new one? Use a couple of CDs?"

"Oh, well why don't you just copy them into a network drive, and then 
copy that back to your new laptop? That'll be a lot easier than messing 
around with CDs."

"Nice idea, but there's some files I'd rather not end up on the network, 
if you know what I mean. I'll just use CDs."

Right. So... rather than store the data temporarily on a busy fileserver 
where it's completely unlikely anybody will be able to recover it in a 
fe weeks' time, you're going to permanently burn it onto CDs, which 
you'll then need to find a way to destroy?

And this is safer because...?

It's almost like that discussion I had the other week with the person 
saying "you don't still use tapes do you? Why don't you use DVDs 
instead?" (Um, gee, because a DVD has about 1/10th the storage capacity?)

I'm also reminded of the story of the user who religiously kept all her 
files on floppy disks so that she wouldn't "fill up" the hard drive in 
her PC. (Which had a capacity of many gigabytes.) Flawless logic - until 
you comprehend the fact that a HD holds many times more data than a 
floppy...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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