http://keepass.info/

There is bureaucratic fight between the NSA and the White House (DHS is a cabinet position) over who gets unfettered access to ALL government networks in the guise of security.

The stories of power grid and SCADA control breaches, the F-35 leaks and nameless Chinese hackers are FUD originating from the NSA to scare other government entities into surrendering full control of their networks to the NSA.

The first place to start reading up on this fight over network control should be the National Cybersecurity Center former head Rod Beckstrom's resignation letter to the head of DHS.

In his resignation letter he states that " NSA effectively controls DHS cyber efforts through detailees, technology insertions, and the proposed move of NPPD and the NCSC to a Fort Meade NSA facility. NSA currently dominates most national cyber efforts. While acknowledging the critical importance of NSA to our intelligence efforts, I believe this is a bad strategy on multiple grounds. The intelligence culture is very different than a network operations or security culture. In addition, the threats to our democratic processes are significant if all top level government network security and monitoring are handled by any one organization (either directly or indirectly). During my term as Director we have been unwilling to subjugate the NCSC underneath the NSA. Instead, we advocated a model where there is a credible civilian government cyber security capability which interfaces with, but is not controlled by, the NSA. "

I think that is the excuse posited when the cable gets a visit from the USS Jimmy Carter.

You can buy a hard drive that will store 1000 CD's for about $100. Buy a 2 or 3 and use some form of raid and you should never lose any data for as long as you tend to the rare disk failure now and then. This thread should be about making a cheap home raid array for backup and the best methods for doing so.. how often to scrub the array, etc.. Reminds me of a colleague that wanted to buy this expensive tape backup system, robot type that auto-mounted tapes.. when we had this awesome, unused netapp sitting in the data center.. wtf?!