Flash drives and CDs and more - Oh, my!

Remember that first USB thumb drive? How liberating it was to replace those bulky, heavy, musty old photo albums with a svelte electronic device the size of (duh) your thumb! True, those Norman Rockwellian moments - three generations sitting before a crackling fire, reminiscing over decades past, fading images laid out before them - would disappear along with those albums...but hey! It was just so darn cool.

Fast-forward to today. You probably have more of these little wonders than you now what to do with, and wistfully recall how easy it was to leaf through an album as you try to remember which thumb drive holds that one image you need right now.

If only that was the real problem.

These modern marvels - along with CDs, DVDs, and other portable storage devices - are referred to as discrete media. You may well use them to hold more than photos, storing digitized versions of personal, private and very important information. And, no matter how careful you are, they can go missing. As the usually-cautious UK discovered recently in a national scandal.

Yep. Despite being sent "as safely as possible," two disks containing sensitive benefit details of 25 million people have disappeared. Gone. Kaput. Along with the most personal, never-tell-anyone, identity-theft-in-a-bottle data that those folks possessed, the reputation of the UK's HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) officials, and the precious peace of mind that is now doomed to be nothing more than a fading memory. Like those photos.

So think very carefully about how and where you choose to safeguard your vital documents. Lost is lost, no matter how cool it once seemed.