Work911 Ezine - Focus on Computer Security and Recovery (For Businesses and Personal Computer Data)

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Robert Bacal

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Mar 27, 2008, 11:41:53 AM3/27/08
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March 27 - 2008 - Contents - Focus On Computer Secuity

In This Issue:

1) Introduction
2) Free Reports and White Papers on Computer Security
3) Computer Continuity (Lessons Learned) Tips By Robert Bacal
4) More IT Help
5) Now There is no Excuse For Not Having a Computer Backup!
6) Small Business Site
7) Our Sites

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1) Introduction - Blue Screens of Death!

In this issue I decided to cover some issues regarding computer
security due to some recent computer problems we've been facing. My
main work computer, which holds all my financial records, in addition
to manuscripts in progress, websites, personal pictures, and some
music collection, began functioning oddly several weeks ago. It's
about 6 years old, and that's about the limit for Microsoft Windows
installations to work properly, and it' also past the useable life
spans of some hardware (like hard drives). The machine felt "haunted",
but virus scans determined it to be clean.

To shorten the story, it eventually stopped working, or booting
altogether, and I managed to get it going by using a restore point.
That success was short, and within a day, it was dead. Tried upgrading
the old operating system. Partial success, then failure. Finally went
to backup files which I restored, and that resulted in a somewhat
useable machine (which is now still working but sluggish).

This whole thing caused me pause. What if I hadn't had backups? What
if I lost everything on the machine and had no other machines with the
same data? The answer was scary, and it should give you thought also.
I would have no business left. I wouldn't be able to file my taxes for
last year, let along respond to taxation questions for other years.
I'd lose books in progress, outlines, and I'd lose some of my access
passwords to business critical functions. Lest you think it's all
business related, I'd also lose irreplacable family photos, email
addresses of people, both friends and family, music collections and
libraries for my Ipod.

Computer and data security isn't just for businesses, but also to
protect your own personal treasures.

You'd think most people take active steps to protect themselves but
they don't. Like any protection against uncommon threats, we tend to
pay little attention to the consequences of rare events that will
happen "to someone else".

So, that's what we're going to talk about.

To end my own story, I ended up replacing the entire computer since,
although it was working, I couldn't trust it enough to rely on it
anymore. The conversion process is yet another story and continues but
I can say that it's a lot easier to convert from one computer to
another when BOTH are still working!

2) Free Professional Reports On Disaster Recover, Continuity, and
Computer Security

A number of reputable companies offer reports and free advice related
to data security and rescue, so we've covered a few options you can
access. They are of most interest to small businesses (or larger) but
the exact same principles are involved for individuals who want to
protect their precious information.

A) Protecting Content During Business Disruption: Are You
Covered?" (Xerox)

Learn how to protect your business from an unexpected disaster by
implementing an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solution.
Significantly improve productivity, streamline business processes, and
reduce the time and cost of managing routine business documents and
information.

The unfortunate rise in business disruptions from natural disasters,
accidents, and human intervention increasingly proves how business
continuity and disaster readiness planning is necessary to any
responsible business operation.

Get it at: http://workhelp.tradepub.com/free/w_xero01

B) A Guide to Spam and Related Threats"

Learn more about today's evolving, interrelated online threats to your
business, and what you can do about them.

Being open for business is synonymous with being online. Your
employees need to communicate at various locations and access various
types of business information stored electronically. But the openness
of online business activity is synonymous with danger. The danger
starts with spam, the top security threat to businesses today, which
began as unwanted advertising, but is now so much more.

http://workhelp.tradepub.com/free/w_ml08

C) Effective Disaster Recovery: Are You Ready?"

Learn how to better prepare your organization for disasters with this
informative white paper.

In this white paper, learn how a simulated business implemented a
disaster recovery plan utilizing IT solutions. Discover how Citrix
solutions can reduce risks, lower disaster recovery costs, and
increase organizational flexibility as part of a disaster recovery
plan. In this paper you will learn how your organization can leverage
IT to deliver essential capabilities for disaster recovery


3) Computer Continuity (Lessons Learned) Tips By Robert Bacal

1) Redundancy in backup methods is necessary. Multiple locations,
multiple media, and multiple methods are the ONLY way to ensure you
can recover your data. For example, I discovered that a music
collection I had on burned cd's and dvd's was, by and large, so
damaged and full of errors that it was lost forever. On the other
hand, our financial data and intellectual property is backed up in two
cities, on several hard drives, on dvd's, and in various formats.

2) Don't underestimate the impact of the loss of your "personal
stuff". Backups aren't just for corporations, or businesses.

3) The cost of backing up is so low now, due to the low cost of both
external hard drives, and removable media like DVD's, that there is no
excuse not to do it.

4) Keep the following areas of your hard drive seperate: You boot area
where windows resides (usually the C: drive); your programs and
applications; your data (text, pictures, music, etc. The reasons is
that while it's a good idea to occasionally have backups for all, you
only need to backup your DATA frequently. Having it all seperate
allows you do do so quickly and efficiently.

5) Never assume any particular backup method actually worked.
Unfortunately, we don't usually get the chance to test the backups we
make until we need them. It's at this point we may discover the
backups are corrupt, or the restore software isn't working properly.
See item one!

6) Guard against all data perils if possible. Perils have several
dimensions. One is how often they are likely to happen, and the other
is how devastating the results. For example, extensive flooding may
occur only once in a hundred years in your location, but the
consequences are total destruction of any hardware, software and data
you might have in that location. The only way to guard against that
(or similarly, fire) is to have offsite backups. (PS. This is one
example of how having backups of your programs or program disks is
important).

4) More IT Help

A number of companies, such as Xerox, Symantec, offer reports and
advice on IT related issues, and in particular, disaster recovery,
continuity, and computer security. Most large corporations have IT
departments to handle this, but these publications are valuable to
everyone, particularly if you are a one person IT department, or run
your own business. We can't list the material available, since there's
so much of it, but it's all free of charge. For information about
computer security, go to:

http://workhelp.tradepub.com/?pt=cat&page=Infosec

For more on data management go to: http://workhelp.tradepub.com/?pt=cat&page=Infodm

For white papers, reports, and reviews on IT subjects go to
http://workhelp.tradepub.com/?pt=cat&page=Info

5) Now There is no Excuse For Not Having a Computer Backup!
By Vic Thomas

This article explains what a (PC or Laptop) Computer Backup is and how
it can now be done quickly and easily and hence why there is really
now no excuse for not having a computer backup.

In this article having a Computer backup means taking a copy of all of
your software and all of your data held on all of the hard drives
inside your PC. Having a full backup of this type means that should
any or all of your hard drives fail or your computer is stolen, you
still have a complete copy of everything that was on your computers
hard drives.

Hard drives are very reliable, but they can go wrong. Also viruses can
corrupt the data on your hard drives. If and when a hard drive problem
occurs you will be glad you took the trouble to keep a full system
backup. The alternative is reloading and configuring all of you
software again and then there is the more difficult problem of all
that lost personal data such as emails, documents, spreadsheets,
PowerPoint presentations, Music, Videos, Photos etc.

In the past computer backups would have been difficult and time
consuming as they might have involved using a lot of floppy disc.
Alternatively you could have gone for either an internal or external
Tape Backup unit. A tape backup would do the complete system backup
for you, but it might take several hours to backup everything on a
system containing perhaps only many megabytes (MB) of data, but
systems today often have gigabytes (GB) of data. (Note, 1GB is 1024MB
i.e. over a thousand times bigger.)

One method to backup your complete system these days is to use a DVD
writer, if your computer system contains a suitable DVD drive. You can
buy software that will backup your complete software and saves it to
the hard drive in a number of compressed large files. Usually two of
these large files can be saved to a 4.7GB DVD. So if your full system
backup produced eight of these large files you would then have to save
these files to four DVDs. All this can be done, it just takes time and
effort and a collection of rewritable DVDs. You must also remember to
do this at regular intervals, and to keep 2 or 3 sets of these backup
DVDs, so that you are never overwriting your current backup disks.
However, there is now a better way and the next method is why there
really is no excuse for not having a computer backup.

You can now get external hard drives that can simply be connected to
your computer (PC or Laptop) via connections such as the USB
connector. These external hard drives can be used to store even more
data, but another very good use for them is as backup devices. When
you purchase one of there external hard drives it may well come with
software that allows you to do full backups as described above. These
backups can be done easily and quickly in one step as all of your
software and data is stored to compressed and possibly encrypted files
on the external hard drive. Encryption of these backup files on the
external hard drive is a very good idea as it means any sensitive
personal data that is backed up is secure, just in case this external
hard drive is stolen.

If you purchase an external hard drive that does not come with its own
backup software then all you need to do is purchase the same type of
backup software that was mentioned above when describing backing up to
DVDs, but in this situation the software will simply backup directly
to the external hard drive eliminating the need to copy files to DVDs.

So now you can do full backups easily and quickly at regular interval.
There is however, another very useful feature that should come with
these types of backup programs and that is to specify specific
directories that you want monitored and if any file in these
directories is updated or a new file is created then these files would
be backed up immediately/dynamically to the external hard drive.

So for example on a Windows system you might specify that your "My
Documents", Desktop and Favorites directories be backed up
dynamically. If you then created a new document and saved it in the
"My Documents" directory a backup would also be saved to the external
hard drive. If you then updated this document and saved it, the
software would automatically backup the file again, possibly giving it
a version number on the external hard drive so that if need be you
could go to the backup and choose from a list of backed up copies of
the same file. This could be useful if you deleted something for
example from a saved Word document, but then later wished you still
had that content, in which case you could go back to the older backed
up version and retrieve the deleted text.

One other thing to consider is that if you keep your external hard
drive permanently connected to your computer there is the possibility
that a virus could corrupt this hard drive or if your computer is
stolen the external hard drive may also be stolen. To guard against
this situation you could also do the DVD backup strategy as described
above occasionally, or you could invest in a second hard drive that is
only used for the full backups and disconnected and stored somewhere
safe between backups.

If you decide to only connect your external hard drive to you computer
when you do a full system backup, you could use the same external hard
drive to backup any other computers you have, assuming the external
hard drive has the storage capacity.

You may well have paid hundreds or even thousands of Dollars/Pounds
etc for your computer hardware and software. You will have spent many
hours configuring and adding data to your system in terms of
documents, spreadsheets, music, photos, videos etc. So if you take all
of this into account and look at the relative cost of purchasing an
external hard drive just for backing up you system, you should now
agree that there is no excuse for not having a Computer Backup.

For suggested computer backup software and external hard drives go to
http://www.clickdigitalproducts.com/technology/help-in-a-digital-world/now-there-is-no-excuse-for-not-having-a-computer-backup.html

From Click Digital Products Webmaster at http://www.ClickDigitalProducts.com

It's a Digital World we live in and sometime we need help, click the
following for more articles like this at Click Digital Products.
http://www.clickdigitalproducts.com/technology/Tech-Info

New Site For Small Business

We're a bit embarrassed by the state of our new site on Small Business
but we figured we'd let you know about it in case you'd like to help
build it. It's in really basic form right now, but it will contain
articles for small business, a library, a resources section set up by
geographic area, and a blog where you'll find musings about small
business, and the opportunity to comment. We are considering opening
up the submission process so others can add their resources for small
business, but the spam problems are huge. Anyway the location is
http://smallbusiness411.org/ . Feel free to register and comment in
the blog section.

If you have any small business oriented articles you would like to
share, let me know in email at c...@work911.com. We prefer material
that hasn't been on the Internet before, but if something is good,
we'll showcase it for you, and of course you can have a short
biography and links as part of the article. Remember -- small business
related ONLY.

Our Sites:

Just a quick summary of our sites that have information on the
following topics:

Leadership Resource Center: http://work911.com/leadership-development/index.html

Communication Resource Center: http://www.work911.com/communication/index.htm

Conflict (both workplace and family) http://conflict911.com

Business, Strategic and Personal Planning: http://www.work911.com/planningmaster/index.html

Performance Management & Appraisal: http://performance-appraisals.org

Customer Service: http://customerservicezone.com

Our Main Site: http://www.work911.com

Multi-Purpose Articles Database: http://www.articles911.com

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