Backing Up

The data most of us keep on our disk drives is valuable. In many cases, it is irreplaceable. How likely is it that your disk drive will fail? You may want to sit down for this. Some experts claim that as many as 30% of disk drives fail before they become obsolete. That's almost a third.

The drive manufacturers, of course, say it's just the nature of the beast. Their critics say that the drive manufacturers have cut way back on testing and simply let the customer do the "testing." The truth is probably somewhere in-between.

Usually you can get your data back, but at a stiff price. The cost of retrieving data from a failed drive is rarely less than $1,000 and can be 2 or 3 times that, or more. Ouch is right! And remember, the operative word here is "usually." About 10% of the time the data recovery people can't retrieve anything. More commonly they can retrieve some but not all the data (and yes, they still charge you the 1,000 bucks, although most don't charge if they can't recover anything).

This is one area where prevention really is a much cheaper solution. The solution that most people recommend these days is backing up to a CD or DVD. DVD burners are available for less than $100 and CD burners are almost free. For that price, can you afford not to do it?

If you have a high-speed Internet connection, check out the services that back up your system automatically every night over the Internet. The cost is low -- something like $15/month for 2 GBytes of storage. One service we know and respect is called Connected. Information on their Online Backup and Recover Service is at http://onlinebackup.connected.com/.

Or take advantage of the low price of disk drives and buy two. You can buy a 200-Gbyte drive for less than $100 these days. Once a day update the second disk from the first. Sure the second drive could also fail, but the probability of both drives failing at the same time is very small.

Remember, the folks who deal with this regularly say that the question isn't whether your drive will fail, but when it will fail. Don't be left out in the cold when it does.

Where Does All This Spam Come From?

Most people believe that spam comes from a few unscrupulous entrepreneurs who make a living sending it out. And some of it still does. The scary fact, though, is that the most now comes from your neighbor's computer.

Symantec recently released its sixth semiannual Internet Security Threat Report. They found that most spam now comes from "bot networks." A bot network consists of thousands of individual PCs that have been infected by a worm or virus that hijacks the machine and puts it under control of people who use it to generate spam, viruses, and other sorts of attack. There are now about 30,000 known bot networks with about 60 million "zombie" PCs. The networks average about 2,000 zombie-PCs each, but Symantec found one with 400,000 zombies.

And they are not all personal systems -- they found that fully 50 percent of the zombie-PCs had IP addresses owned by Fortune 500 corporations. Access to these networks is sold on the black market for about 10 cents per compromised computer. The buyers use the network to send out whatever nefarious messages they can devise.

Obviously, there's also a lot of protection out there, because the Internet still works for most of us. But it's clear that installing and maintaining protection is getting more and more important. The experts in computer security recommend that every system have the following:

1. A hardware firewall (usually in the form of a router) for each Internet broadband connection.

2. A software firewall for each computer on a network to prevent undetected rogue programs from sending out personal data (we use ZoneAlarm).

3. An anti-virus program that updates its data daily.

4. An antispam program. Some people use spam-control programs on their machines, others have their ISP filter their email.

5. An anti-adware program to guard against adware and spyware.

Most of these are a pain to set up but almost invisible once they are up and working. The easiest way to do it is to get a professional to set it up initially and then have the system checked once every 6 months or so to make sure everything is working correctly. If you need a referral to someone who can do this competently, contact us.

Thanks for joining us this month. See you next month.