Hello,

Happy Fourth of July.

Sometimes fireworks can cause minor damage to your home or totally destroy a home which could mean losing your PC with all your family pictures.  So my question to those of you who read this is, how do you insure your PC/Laptop data?  Do you back up to an external hard drive on a regular basis or do you use some type of offsite backup or do you do both?

I do both. I have about 180 Gigabytes of data (which includes music, pictures, spreadsheets, word documents, etc) that I back up to a second internal hard drive on a nightly basis and I also backup to an offsite server as well.

Why do both?  If I have to recover a large file (i.e. an Outlook PST file of 1 gigabyte file), the restoration of that file is quicker from my second internal hard drive than from an offsite restoration.  The offsite backup is protection from total loss (i.e. a house fire, or your house being hit by lighting and frying your PC/Laptop).

There are several advantages to offsite backup.  Here are a few:  if your PC and external hard drive are destroyed by a house fire or lightening hitting the house, your data is safe because it is stored offsite; you do not have to remember to attach the external hard drive  to your PC or laptop; and your external hard drive can go bad.

Last week, a client’s external hard drive crashed.  Fortunately for my client I was able to recover the data.  If they had used an offsite backup system, my client could have save some money by logging into their account and downloading the file.  Now many of my clients only use offsite backup to insure their data.  If and when their hard drive failed, they have  no problem restoring their data from their offsite backup location.  If you decided to start backing up your data offsite, please make sure the company you use encrypts your data.

One more thing, there is a new Rootkit out there.  A Rootkit is a trojan.  This Trojan requires a complete wipe and rebuild of your computer if you get it.  The Trojan hides the boot sector (Ouch). (The boot sector comes up when you turn on your computer.  It tells the system where to go to start the Windows operating system).  The Rootkit is called “Popureb”.  Please check this website for further information about this nasty critter: http://www.wservernews.com/go/1309601826046

Ruben