Someone wrote in the wiki:

"One of the best backup storage media is CD. As virus cannot copy itself into the CD, using the same CD on another healthy computer will not infect it, unless the virus is present together with the files when the backup CD is created."

in general, that's not true (sorry if i misled you) - the old PC in FSM 2.18 (fortunately) doesn't have a CD writer so it can't write to my CD

- But sir, isn't that CD-Rs will become CD-ROM when data are written on them?

You ask a good question, albeit one outside the scope of our syllabus, and it deserves an answer. As far as i know (which, frankly, isn't very far), CD-R's are "write once, read many". That means you can't delete or overwrite data already on one, but you can add to it.

- Can the virus add itself to the cd even when no burning softwares are installed on the pc?

It's the hardware that counts here. Older cheap PCs - like the one in 2.18 - don't have the physical capability of burning data onto a CD.

Viruses are not things to be taken lightly. On a personal note, as my income depends on my work, and my work is mostly writing, i take extra precautions to protect myself against losing my data. One of the problems of Microsoft Windows is that its data protection regime is not very strong and often the only solution to an infection by a new virus is to completely reformat the hard disk, in so doing losing all its data. So to be on the safe side, i have 2 hard disks in my PC. One contains the Windows operating system. The other has 2 partitions (2 separate spaces); one of these is for my own Windows data, and the other has a completely different operating system called Xubuntu (a variant of Unix). I've set it up so Xubuntu can see my Windows data, but Windows can't see my Xubuntu data. From time to time - that reminds me, it's been quite some time since i last did it, so i had better do it again today! - i copy all my data to a Xubuntu partition that Windows (and its viruses) can't see.

This way, if i ever have to reformat the Windows drive, i won't lose my data. Plus, if my data ever becomes infected, i have a backup copy of it in a Xubuntu partition.

Of course, this is not 100% safe, as there are Unix viruses too! Plus, there is no guarantee that my backup is virus-free, as it could contain one that wasn't detected at the time of making the backup copy. So to make extra sure, i copy all the stuff that i really don't want to lose (mostly my own writings that are not electronically published elsewhere) to my Google site, so Google's hardware can keep it safe for me. Thanks, Google!

My PC is pretty old, and its hardware can only cope with old style hard disks, which have much less capacity than modern ones. So as an archive resource (and a third backup) i have an 80Gb external hard drive on a USB connection. All this talk about viruses, plus some odd behaviour of my PC recently, made me wonder whether it had caught a dose of something nasty, so last night i ran a check on it using Avast. It took nearly 14 hours!

It seems to be virus-free, so either its got a new virus that Avast cannot detect, or the odd behaviour i was observing is due to a flaw in the old USB controller hardware/software, which can't cope very well with modern devices. I recall reading some techie stuff on the web about this last time it happened. If i ever find out for sure what was causing the odd behaviour (frequent "device not recognised" popups, jerky mouse and running slower than usual), i will update this note.

I'm not sure if these have anything to do with the main topic but:

1) Someone has told me that if a PC/laptop has more than one anti-virus application, the PC could go lagged. Is it true?

2)Where should we post questions? Here in the forum or in the wiki?