You are simply fooling yourself if you believe the information on your computer belongs to you only. Unless you have some top of the line data protection programming on your computer system though other people can be looking at your files. This can be scary if you have any files on your computer that you don’t want others to see.
This can be your bank account, passwords you use to access your online accounts, and possibly some piracy you have engaged in for movies or music. Too many of us are comfortable thinking that since our computer is in our home it is safe from others accessing it.
With a quality data protection software program you have the lock to keep your computer files secret. There are two different types of data protection programs you can choose from. One of them prevents outsiders from being able to access your computer files. This type of data protection software includes a firewall that hackers can’t penetrate. They also protect your passwords.
These are great ways to ensure data protection but remember that hackers are pretty smart. They have sophisticated software too. To make sure your information can’t be compromised go for a data protection program that offers high tech encrypting. If you have the Windows Vista operating system then you will find these encrypting algorithms already in available to you. Otherwise you can buy a quality data protection software program from a retailer or a computer store.
The problem of identity theft is out of control these days, and the majority of it is taking place online. Hackers have found ways to get into a person’s system and before they know what happened their bank accounts are empty and their credit cards are maxed out. The person who hacked into the account is very rarely caught so many criminals think this is a safe way to make money fast. Don’t let your personal information be easily accessible so that you become their next victim.
With the right data protection system in place you can breath easier about the transactions you do online. The internet offers us plenty of convenience but don’t fool yourself into thinking all of your information is safe because no one has physical access to your computer.
If you found this information on Data Protection useful, you'll want to read this article about Data Recovery Service.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Caleb_Liu
Monday, August 27, 2007
Saturday, August 25, 2007
Online Computer Data Backup and Recovery - How Do I Know My Digital Information is Being Backed Up?
“Your computer backup is only as good as the information put into it, and the regular monitoring and testing applied thereafter.”
Q: How do I know if the online data backup and recovery service I’m using is actually backing up my computer every day?
A: Excellent question—because, unless you’re receiving email confirmation on a daily basis from your chosen storage provider, telling you that your backup has completed successfully on that particular day, you can’t know for certain.
And herein lies one of the many dangerous pitfalls of “self-serve” websites that allow you to (translate as: insist that you) download applications unassisted, leaving you to install and set up the application yourself. How can you possibly know that you’ve set up the application to run properly? What assurance do you receive from a faceless corporate website, without even a telephone number for possible contact with a human being, that your digital records are indeed being encrypted and securely stored offsite? Are you willing to accept an automatically processed charge on your monthly credit card statement as proof that your business is being backed up in entirety each and every day?
And with something as critical to the survival of your business as daily computer backup, you certainly do not want to take the chance that you’ve missed a step or omitted a critical file from your backup set. Moreover, as a savvy business owner, you want to know that you’re getting the service that you’re paying for.
But, even more to the point, the whole purpose of computer backup is the ability to recover information destroyed by a hard drive crash, or lost to a fire or theft.
So picture this: 18 months ago you downloaded an application to automatically backup your computer online on a daily basis, allowing you to erase the concern of data loss from your mind. Every month you notice the small charge on your credit card statement, and you feel relieved that your information is protected, and glad that you never have to think about data backup.
But one day, unexpectedly, your trusty computer crashes and wipes out your client database, all your accounting records, emails, and documents. It’s a bad situation, but at least once you get your new computer set up you’ll be able to restore your information! Right?
Wrong—because about 12 months ago you installed a Windows update that, unbeknownst to you, changed a setting that prevented your backup from running. You’ve been charged to store your information for the last 12 months offsite, but your chosen service provider has only been storing the information as it appeared the day before the Windows update. You’ve just lost an entire year’s worth of progress, and there’s nothing you can do about it. You can fight with your service provider to have your storage charges refunded, but that’s not going to get you your data back.
You’re extremely surprised to learn that no one employed by your service provider was monitoring your account. There were no safeguards in place to alert you or your storage provider that something had gone amiss. Why? Because you chose the cheapest solution that requires that you know enough about your own system to verify, on your own, that your backup is running properly. And guess what? You agreed to this arrangement when you clicked “accept” to the service agreement at the time of installation. You agreed that you would monitor and test your backup yourself.
Shocking, but true. This being said, here are some tips to prevent this nightmare from happening to you:
What Not To Do:
1. Keep convincing yourself that this won’t happen to you.
2. Tell yourself that you have the time, energy and expertise necessary to monitor and test your backup yourself.
3. Put off making a decision on a reliable backup solution for another day.
4. Employ an online data backup service based strictly on price.
What To Do:
1. Online services need not be impersonal nor absent. Outsource your daily online data backup to a storage provider that first speaks with you to learn about you and your business, and then completes the software installation and setup for you.
2. Insist on daily email confirmation that your backup is running successfully.
3. Choose a storage provider that invites you to call for telephone support 24/7/365.
4. Ensure that the onus for regular monitoring and testing of your account is placed on the storage provider. They’re the experts, so make them prove it.
5. Commit right now the time and resources necessary to protect the survival of your business with daily offsite computer backup. Don’t become a bankruptcy statistic because you procrastinated on protecting your company’s more valuable asset—your information.
And remember, your computer backup is only as good as your ability to recover lost information when you need it most. Survive the crash, restore your information, and look forward to your next success.
Copyright 2007 - Blue Melnick. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. Reprint Rights: You may reprint this article as long as you leave all of the links active, do not edit the article in any way, and include the following byline:
Blue Melnick is the Co-Founder and Lead Storage Specialist of Virtual Tape Drive Canada. Blue invites you to contact him through http://www.vtdcanada.com/ or by phone at 416-462-3323. Not sure if online data backup is right for you? Why not sign up for Biz Link News—Blue’s free ezine—to learn more about how this new technology can “save” your business?
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Blue_Melnick
Q: How do I know if the online data backup and recovery service I’m using is actually backing up my computer every day?
A: Excellent question—because, unless you’re receiving email confirmation on a daily basis from your chosen storage provider, telling you that your backup has completed successfully on that particular day, you can’t know for certain.
And herein lies one of the many dangerous pitfalls of “self-serve” websites that allow you to (translate as: insist that you) download applications unassisted, leaving you to install and set up the application yourself. How can you possibly know that you’ve set up the application to run properly? What assurance do you receive from a faceless corporate website, without even a telephone number for possible contact with a human being, that your digital records are indeed being encrypted and securely stored offsite? Are you willing to accept an automatically processed charge on your monthly credit card statement as proof that your business is being backed up in entirety each and every day?
And with something as critical to the survival of your business as daily computer backup, you certainly do not want to take the chance that you’ve missed a step or omitted a critical file from your backup set. Moreover, as a savvy business owner, you want to know that you’re getting the service that you’re paying for.
But, even more to the point, the whole purpose of computer backup is the ability to recover information destroyed by a hard drive crash, or lost to a fire or theft.
So picture this: 18 months ago you downloaded an application to automatically backup your computer online on a daily basis, allowing you to erase the concern of data loss from your mind. Every month you notice the small charge on your credit card statement, and you feel relieved that your information is protected, and glad that you never have to think about data backup.
But one day, unexpectedly, your trusty computer crashes and wipes out your client database, all your accounting records, emails, and documents. It’s a bad situation, but at least once you get your new computer set up you’ll be able to restore your information! Right?
Wrong—because about 12 months ago you installed a Windows update that, unbeknownst to you, changed a setting that prevented your backup from running. You’ve been charged to store your information for the last 12 months offsite, but your chosen service provider has only been storing the information as it appeared the day before the Windows update. You’ve just lost an entire year’s worth of progress, and there’s nothing you can do about it. You can fight with your service provider to have your storage charges refunded, but that’s not going to get you your data back.
You’re extremely surprised to learn that no one employed by your service provider was monitoring your account. There were no safeguards in place to alert you or your storage provider that something had gone amiss. Why? Because you chose the cheapest solution that requires that you know enough about your own system to verify, on your own, that your backup is running properly. And guess what? You agreed to this arrangement when you clicked “accept” to the service agreement at the time of installation. You agreed that you would monitor and test your backup yourself.
Shocking, but true. This being said, here are some tips to prevent this nightmare from happening to you:
What Not To Do:
1. Keep convincing yourself that this won’t happen to you.
2. Tell yourself that you have the time, energy and expertise necessary to monitor and test your backup yourself.
3. Put off making a decision on a reliable backup solution for another day.
4. Employ an online data backup service based strictly on price.
What To Do:
1. Online services need not be impersonal nor absent. Outsource your daily online data backup to a storage provider that first speaks with you to learn about you and your business, and then completes the software installation and setup for you.
2. Insist on daily email confirmation that your backup is running successfully.
3. Choose a storage provider that invites you to call for telephone support 24/7/365.
4. Ensure that the onus for regular monitoring and testing of your account is placed on the storage provider. They’re the experts, so make them prove it.
5. Commit right now the time and resources necessary to protect the survival of your business with daily offsite computer backup. Don’t become a bankruptcy statistic because you procrastinated on protecting your company’s more valuable asset—your information.
And remember, your computer backup is only as good as your ability to recover lost information when you need it most. Survive the crash, restore your information, and look forward to your next success.
Copyright 2007 - Blue Melnick. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. Reprint Rights: You may reprint this article as long as you leave all of the links active, do not edit the article in any way, and include the following byline:
Blue Melnick is the Co-Founder and Lead Storage Specialist of Virtual Tape Drive Canada. Blue invites you to contact him through http://www.vtdcanada.com/ or by phone at 416-462-3323. Not sure if online data backup is right for you? Why not sign up for Biz Link News—Blue’s free ezine—to learn more about how this new technology can “save” your business?
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Blue_Melnick
Why You Must Back Up Your Files Regularly Or Risk Losing Everything
In this segment, we're going to talk about why you need to Back Up Regularly, or Risk Losing Everything
Why Back Up?
Something I've seen over and over again in the years I've been helping people with computers are computer users – both at home and at work – who never back up their files.
This is a really bad idea, and if you're guilty of this, I suggest you make a point to start regularly backing up your files. Let me explain why.
As you may know, every file on your computer – from photos, to music, to email, all of your programs, and even Windows or Mac OS X – everything is stored on a part of your computer called the hard drive.
Hard drives are the best technology available to us right now to store files on a computer, but unfortunately they can break down for a lot of reasons. Because of this, pretty much every hard drive will fail eventually (anything in a computer can break down, but the hard drive is one of the most common parts to go), and when this happens, chances are some or all of the files on the drive will be lost.
Unfortunately most people learn this lesson the hard way, myself included! Years ago, when I was fresh out of high school, I still owned my first computer which was already least a few years old by then.
One day I was using my computer when I started hearing a clicking noise from inside the case, and suddenly couldn't open my files -- my computer's hard drive was breaking down!
I quickly realized what was going on and started copying my files as fast as I could to floppy disks (this is long before CD burners ).
Hours later, after I don't know how many floppies, and after hitting "retry" over and over and over, I managed to scrape maybe half of my important files off the drive before it completely fell apart.
I was devastated: I'd lost so much of my early writing (short stories I wrote for myself, plus school work) and a lot of other important work.
Imagine the most important things you keep on your computer. I don't know if this would be your favorite memories in the form of pictures or home videos, important writing, like emails or Word documents, critical financial records – imagine what it would feel like to watch all of those irreplaceable things just go up in smoke right before your eyes.
I'm a writer, and I lost at least half of my early writing, which I still miss sometimes, over sixteen years later!
And I was lucky!
I have seen so many people bring their computers to me with a failing or dead hard drive. I've worked on their computers and in some cases I was able to get their files, but a lot of times it was just too late.
They lost everything.
And people don't just lose files because of bad hard drives!
Other times, people lose files due to viruses, a young kid playing around on their computer, or even by accidentally erasing something themselves.
The results can be stressful and upsetting if this happens on a personal computer, but it can be fatal to a business: according to the Gartner Group, an IT research company, the estimate is that "43 percent of businesses fail... following a major disaster and 29 percent fail within the first two to four months."
And believe me, for a business – and for a lot of home users who keep their tax records, loan info, and other critical financial information on their computer – losing your files can truly be a major disaster.
But it's so easy to avoid.
If all those people had just taken a few minutes to back up their files on a regular basis, at worst they would've lost a few days' worth of work, or as little as a few hours – however long it was since their last backup!
OK, so that covers why you need to back up, but you may be wondering how to back up. There are a number of ways to go, some better, some worse than others. I have a strategy anyone can follow that gives you the best chance of avoiding the loss I've just talked about.
But that's the subject of a different article.
Want to hear important tips like this and others that can help protect your privacy and security on your computer, as well as keep your files safe? I have this information and more in my free special report on CD "5 Common & Costly Computer Mistakes and How to Avoid Making Them Yourself", which is available at: http://www.worthgodwin.com/report
Worth Godwin is a computer coach with a dozen years' experience helping computer users of all levels, and has also worked for many years "in the trenches" as a hardware and software tech, solving real-world computer problems.
Worth has also been studying the human mind, and how people learn, since the early 1990s. He draws upon all of this experience, as well as his English and writing degrees, to teach people in a unique way with explanations that really make sense.
In 2006, Worth began putting his easy lessons together as video lessons on CD, carefully designed to make it easy to learn at your own pace, for an affordable price. These lessons let you see each click of the mouse and every step of the lesson, while you hear Worth's clear explanations. Individual CDs as well as entire courses are available for both Windows and Macs, and everything comes with a full 1-year no-hassle money back guarantee.
More information, and testimonials from happy clients, are available at http://www.WorthGodwin.com
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Worth_Godwin
Why Back Up?
Something I've seen over and over again in the years I've been helping people with computers are computer users – both at home and at work – who never back up their files.
This is a really bad idea, and if you're guilty of this, I suggest you make a point to start regularly backing up your files. Let me explain why.
As you may know, every file on your computer – from photos, to music, to email, all of your programs, and even Windows or Mac OS X – everything is stored on a part of your computer called the hard drive.
Hard drives are the best technology available to us right now to store files on a computer, but unfortunately they can break down for a lot of reasons. Because of this, pretty much every hard drive will fail eventually (anything in a computer can break down, but the hard drive is one of the most common parts to go), and when this happens, chances are some or all of the files on the drive will be lost.
Unfortunately most people learn this lesson the hard way, myself included! Years ago, when I was fresh out of high school, I still owned my first computer which was already least a few years old by then.
One day I was using my computer when I started hearing a clicking noise from inside the case, and suddenly couldn't open my files -- my computer's hard drive was breaking down!
I quickly realized what was going on and started copying my files as fast as I could to floppy disks (this is long before CD burners ).
Hours later, after I don't know how many floppies, and after hitting "retry" over and over and over, I managed to scrape maybe half of my important files off the drive before it completely fell apart.
I was devastated: I'd lost so much of my early writing (short stories I wrote for myself, plus school work) and a lot of other important work.
Imagine the most important things you keep on your computer. I don't know if this would be your favorite memories in the form of pictures or home videos, important writing, like emails or Word documents, critical financial records – imagine what it would feel like to watch all of those irreplaceable things just go up in smoke right before your eyes.
I'm a writer, and I lost at least half of my early writing, which I still miss sometimes, over sixteen years later!
And I was lucky!
I have seen so many people bring their computers to me with a failing or dead hard drive. I've worked on their computers and in some cases I was able to get their files, but a lot of times it was just too late.
They lost everything.
And people don't just lose files because of bad hard drives!
Other times, people lose files due to viruses, a young kid playing around on their computer, or even by accidentally erasing something themselves.
The results can be stressful and upsetting if this happens on a personal computer, but it can be fatal to a business: according to the Gartner Group, an IT research company, the estimate is that "43 percent of businesses fail... following a major disaster and 29 percent fail within the first two to four months."
And believe me, for a business – and for a lot of home users who keep their tax records, loan info, and other critical financial information on their computer – losing your files can truly be a major disaster.
But it's so easy to avoid.
If all those people had just taken a few minutes to back up their files on a regular basis, at worst they would've lost a few days' worth of work, or as little as a few hours – however long it was since their last backup!
OK, so that covers why you need to back up, but you may be wondering how to back up. There are a number of ways to go, some better, some worse than others. I have a strategy anyone can follow that gives you the best chance of avoiding the loss I've just talked about.
But that's the subject of a different article.
Want to hear important tips like this and others that can help protect your privacy and security on your computer, as well as keep your files safe? I have this information and more in my free special report on CD "5 Common & Costly Computer Mistakes and How to Avoid Making Them Yourself", which is available at: http://www.worthgodwin.com/report
Worth Godwin is a computer coach with a dozen years' experience helping computer users of all levels, and has also worked for many years "in the trenches" as a hardware and software tech, solving real-world computer problems.
Worth has also been studying the human mind, and how people learn, since the early 1990s. He draws upon all of this experience, as well as his English and writing degrees, to teach people in a unique way with explanations that really make sense.
In 2006, Worth began putting his easy lessons together as video lessons on CD, carefully designed to make it easy to learn at your own pace, for an affordable price. These lessons let you see each click of the mouse and every step of the lesson, while you hear Worth's clear explanations. Individual CDs as well as entire courses are available for both Windows and Macs, and everything comes with a full 1-year no-hassle money back guarantee.
More information, and testimonials from happy clients, are available at http://www.WorthGodwin.com
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Worth_Godwin
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