Rethinking Backups

I chose last night to do backups of my data on my primary machine. I have nearly 90GB of documents, pictures, music, video, e-mail, bookmarks/favorites, and my desktop. I copy all of this, usually on a quarterly basis, to my MyBook 1TB external drive connected via a USB cable.

When I started the copy I was informed that the operation would take 135 minutes, and that, of course, is just the first SWAG of an estimate made by Windows Explorer. What it really took I don't know because I left it and went to bed. Fortunately the operation completed successfully, and did not get hung on on some issue, as can happen from time to time. So when I awoke today I had successfully completed backing up all 90GB.

The data went into a new folder I named MY DATA FROM WINDOWS 7 LAPTOP BACKED UP ON 9-1-2010. I have several such folders which are now getting close to filling up the 1TB. Soon I shall have to free up some space and will go and delete the oldest backup to do that. And so it goes.

I think I shall be giving some thought to finding an alternate and better way to back up all of this data. It would be very nice to have it stored at an off site location where I would be able to access it from anywhere, but then I'd have to pare down the amount of data if I wanted an affordable solution.

I'll let you know what I come up with, if anything, but I don't expect to do that soon. Right now I am feeling pretty good knowing I have a complete backup of all of my data. I hope you are enjoying that same feeling.

Update on new rogue programs

If you go to this web site, note  that everything on the page you go to is new! I was amazed to see how many new rogues were found in the month of August.

You should scroll through them all just to get the idea of what they look like so that should you run into one you will know it is a fake and you can react accordingly.

Note there is even a fake MSRT this month! Pretty clever.

Keep your antivirus up to date. I hope most of you are now using Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE). MSE appears to be a very serious product, and like most everything else I recommend, it is free.

Run Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware, Superantispyware, and Spybot regularly, and be sure you get the current month's HOSTS file in place.

Bharath's Security Blog

This one caught my eye. I find it hard to believe, but there it is. It would be wise to run a virus scan and malware scan on your thumb drives just to be sure they are clean. I'd add checking thumb drives to your regular security checks as well.

The article is on the computerworld.com web site at

1-in-4 worms spread through infected USB devices