Lately in the news there have been reports of computers being “hijacked” and people being told that they had to pay a ransom to get the use of their computers back and if one pays, one may or may not actually get their computer use back. The amount asked can vary from a few hundred to over ten thousand dollars depending on whose computer it is and who has hijacked it.
There has also been - as I am sure you know - those who will send a virus, worm, or other malware to others’ computers.
In all of the above cases having a good, up to date firewall, virus protection, and malware software is important. Also one should be careful about emails and who they are from. Never open an attachment in an email if you do not know the person or if you do not know that the email is validly from the person you know. I have on a number of occasions received an email from someone or other, people well known to me and who I correspond with by email, and the subject line seems odd. I don’t open the email, but instead send an email to the person asking if the email is really from them. Often it is not and the person has had their account hacked - I then delete the email UNOPENED. I hate to cast aspersions, but in most cases, requests from Linkedin, saying that someone has invited you to join are dangerous and not from the person - delete them UNOPENED! You can contact the person separately to double check if you want, but there is a good chance it not from the person. All of these steps will help protect your computer from being hacked, as well as from viruses, worms and other malware.
Something which is very important to do is to back up your computer - often. If this is done it will help restore your computer if something does happen to it. I back up my data after each session of working on the computer (if I work on the computer in the afternoon I back it up and then if I come back in the evening and work again, I back the data up again). I also back up my data once a week and then once a month I back it up to keep it “offsite”. On a different date once a month I also back up the entire computer - or in my case - all 3 computers.
I keep almost all of my data off the computer on USB thumb drives (also called stick drives and other similar names) and use them for most of my back ups. They are rather inexpensive. (I will just call them drives to save time and space in this post.) I know about “the cloud”, but prefer not to put my information out in same, another place for it to be hacked so I use the drives. The ones I use vary from 4 to 16 gigabits, with some smaller ones, which used to be used for backing up and have been replaced with bigger newer ones, being used for things such as the drive on which I keep my copy of my blog posts, temporary use, or moving info from one computer to another if it is easier than sending it through the central drive on our router.
I have a drive for my data - I organize it into folders. It holds my letters and other such, my financial information, my spreadsheets, and so on of regular data. My calender data has to be on the computer, so it is not on the drive. I also have a variety of other drives for different data purposes - one for each business client (I take the drive to the client when I work and use it in my business laptop and on my desktop at home, this way the data on it is always the correct data to use), one for my current project of scanning in instructions and warranties, one for information I need in our RV when we are traveling, etc.
I also use the drives for backups. I have an A and B drive for daily backups of the data drive, calender, and clients. I use the A one and next time the B one, and then the A one again. This way the most data I can lose is the just completed session of work (or fun).
This worked well until I had a problem. There was a problem with the computer and the data and by the time I realized it, I had overwritten the backups several time and had to go back and redo my work. So, I came up with the idea of a weekly backup. This is another drive. I have 6 folders for my data, 6 folders for my calender and 3 folders for my clients (I generally only work once a month on each client’s info). I back up one week to each of the folders and then go back and over write them. So the folders on this drive read, for example - Backup, 0408 Backup, 0415 Backup, 0422 Backup, 0429 Backup, 0506 Backup - and the one without a date would have been backed up on 05/13 and I will change the name on it when I go to backup again to include that date and the 0408 will have the date removed and become the backup to be written over. The other folders are similarly named for their various purposes. If I find that problem has been continued - I have 6 weeks of backups to go back to for reference.
Once a month I copy the data drive, calender, and other data I need to be sure of, to another set of 2 drives for offsite storage. Sounds complicated? I used to send one of the drives to work with my husband and he would bring the old one back - off site - away from our house. When he stopped going out to work I was stumped. Then I had the idea to keep the offsite drive in our safe deposit box and I go there once a month and take the last one and leave the newest updated one in the box. Simple to do and if (God forbid) something happened to my house there is a backup. These drives also have a copy of my last archive disk - more about that later.
For all of the above backups I use a freeware program called Syncback.
When I do this I also burn two DVD disks (I use a rewritable disks) of the data on the offsite drive as DVDs are more stable than the USB thumb drives - just in case. One DVD is available at home for me to use. The second DVD goes into my emergency “grab it folder” just in case there is a disaster coming so I have a quick way to grab information to take with me. (I will talk about this folder some other time.)
I also have an external hard drive and once a month - in the middle of the month - I back up my computers to it. (Desktop, work laptop, and kitchen laptop) This will allow the restoration of the entire computer if needed. I recently had to get a larger one, and I now back up to the new hard drive monthly and the old hard drive quarterly - just in case. I use a commercial program for the backups to these drives. I keep a few years of the backups on these drives.
This is a lot of backups - daily, weekly, monthly, and computer monthly, and there are other unusual ones but it allays my fear of losing data. Early in our use of home computers we had an electric surge on our Commodore 128 and we lost the hard drive and all the data on it - this is why I keep as little data as possible on the hard drive and back it all up - a lot. We also disconnect our computers when they are not in use - we have them plugged into surge protector boxes which are plugged into regular multiplug boxes and we unplug the surge protectors from the multiplug boxes so the computers and peripherals are not plugged in when not in use for protection.
Now, the archive. One accumulates a lot of data over the years and decades. Too much data in every day use can make the data cumbersome. I have another USB thumb drive that use as an archive. Each year I move last year’s data to the archive drive and add it to the data there. I do this about a month or so into the year, as I like to do the bank reconciliations on the December statements and post interest (such as it is these days) received, so it is usually done in late January or early February. Sometimes I will do a second update to the archive of business items related to the prior year, later in the year. When I transfer these files to the archive I back up the archive to, yes, 2 DVD disks, which are kept in the same places as the monthly offsite DVD drives. I also will copy the updated archive to the off site drives - (first the one I have in the house waiting to go to the vault, and then when I bring the one in the vault home, I copy the new archive to it also).
I delete everything which has been copied to the archive drive from my assorted data drives. I then do a backup of everything to one of the daily backup drives. I then format the OTHER one of the daily backup drives and back up the data drive, etc to it, so it no longer has what has been transferred to the archive drive - just the current data. I then format the FIRST daily backup drive and run the backup. This way each of them has a clean version of the backup and the items moved to the archive drive is no longer on the daily backup drives.
I am sure by now your brain is swimming. I use my computers for work as well as personal and I don’t want to chance a client being audited and not having everything I need, nor do I want to look for a letter I wrote to a craft show about our doing the show, and then the following year be missing the information I need for the new show. Also, well, in case you have not figured it out, I am a bit crazy and don’t want to lose any information. I have had times when I make a mistake doing something on the computer and as I try to fix it I get into more and more of a problem. I know that I can always pull out the last backup and replace the what I have messed up and start over.
The important thing is to make sure you backup your data and your computer on a regular basis. This way if anything happens to your computer or your data, you have not lost the work you have done, the photos of your children etc.
I just remembered - I have tried in the past to backup my email and it has not worked as it is too cumbersome - I will try again to do this, but in the meantime I leave my email in my account and on my computer so it is in two places.
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