I learned this lesson the hard way a few years ago. I was sitting at my computer at home, minding my own business when I caught a virus. Like an eye-watering kick to the crotch, within seconds the virus managed to foul up my computer’s innards so thoroughly it corrupted my machine’s operating system.
Yes, my computer was fine one minute – running through fields of digital daisies and frolicking like Heidi with perky cyber pigtails and a basket of fresh strawberries from grand-mama’s garden.
In the blink of an eye, the sky grew dark and Heidi is running for her life from a band of evil virus-ninjas bent on tearing her cute little pigtails from her happy little head.
How does the story end you might ask? Well, the ninjas catch Heidi and beat the bajeezus out of her, eating every strawberry in her basket.
All my precious data was gone.
Not a single one or zero to be found.
I had to boot from my external start-up disc and initialize my entire hard drive, losing 50-60GB of data (music, photos, games, important emails, etc).
Did I learn a lesson?
Oh shit, did I ever.
Here are some things I have done to prevent this from ever happening again:
- I have since purchased a 250GB Seagate external hard drive to back up all my data (basically mirroring my hard drive). I have software running on my machine that automates the backups on a weekly schedule (daily for my blog data).
- I use a web-based email (I recommend google’s gmail for this), address books, social bookmarking sites, and web based feed readers. This allows me to sit down at any computer with internet access and have the exact same functionality as I would at home.
- If I don’t know who sent it, I don’t open it. If it looks like a suspicious file, it probably is….although I’d be very impressed if it can get passed the firewall…
- I run a firewall on our DSL router for internet access at home and lock down our wifi with password protection (by the way, anyone who had wireless internet access at home and DOESN’T password protect it is simply crazy…it’s basically allowing anyone in your neighborhood to have access to your internet connection…and potentially your computer as well.)
- I put back-ups in multiple places. For example, I have 5 copies of all the files that make up this website. One on the actual server hosting it, one on my computer, one on my back-up hard drive, one on a little jump drive I carry with me to work…and one on my iPod.
(Yes, this entire site is backed up on my iPod. It’s somewhere between Led Zeppelin and Miles Davis I think.)
