A tale of Woe and.....redemption.

There's a reason I harp to people about backups.   Yesterday is a prime example of that reason.  My PC was down for the better part of the day due to a virus/hacker infection.    It started out as an ordinary day.  I was doing some straightforward legitimate research on an issue for work, which does on occasion require me to go out to google, and perform some web searches, etc.   I clicked on a link out of google, and page opens, looks like junk, something I didn't even think relevant to what I was searching on, and clicked off to a different page.  That's when about four other processes kicked off, and hijacked my PC.

Now, I sit behind two physical firewalls.  The PC has both anti-virus AND a personal software firewall.   I route through a proxy system that ostensibly also blocks such things.  This got through all of that.  It knocked out my anti-virus, and the personal firewall.  AND it knocked out local system resources such as my ability to reboot into safe-mode so that I could do a proper AV scan.

How much data did I lose?   None.  At least in part because I was able to recover.   But also because I'd backed everything up on Wednesday.   This could have been a horrible tale of frustration.   I could have lost everything I'd done this past two weeks or more.  And, I don't always backup everything on the PC, just what I consider most critical.   There's a bunch of minor downloads, and other bits that I'd probably have missed/regret not having a backup for if this had been a case of: wipe clean start over.   That's still a potential with this PC, as I'm not 100% convinced everything is back to proper sorts.   But what I do know: I haven't lost data, because it's backed up elsewhere.

Do yourself a favor.  Please.  Backup your stuff.  Yeah, it's not Wednesday, my normal day for pitching it.  But do it for me one more time.  Back it up.

Tell me, what's your worst tale of PC woe?   Have you ever lost data?   Have you had to start something completely over because your PC crashed, and you had neither a backup or hard copy anywhere else?

EDIT: To any guests who may be joining via Jon Gibb's post, welcome, feel free to jump on in.

A tale of Woe and.....redemption.

There's a reason I harp to people about backups.   Yesterday is a prime example of that reason.  My PC was down for the better part of the day due to a virus/hacker infection.    It started out as an ordinary day.  I was doing some straightforward legitimate research on an issue for work, which does on occasion require me to go out to google, and perform some web searches, etc.   I clicked on a link out of google, and page opens, looks like junk, something I didn't even think relevant to what I was searching on, and clicked off to a different page.  That's when about four other processes kicked off, and hijacked my PC.

Now, I sit behind two physical firewalls.  The PC has both anti-virus AND a personal software firewall.   I route through a proxy system that ostensibly also blocks such things.  This got through all of that.  It knocked out my anti-virus, and the personal firewall.  AND it knocked out local system resources such as my ability to reboot into safe-mode so that I could do a proper AV scan.

How much data did I lose?   None.  At least in part because I was able to recover.   But also because I'd backed everything up on Wednesday.   This could have been a horrible tale of frustration.   I could have lost everything I'd done this past two weeks or more.  And, I don't always backup everything on the PC, just what I consider most critical.   There's a bunch of minor downloads, and other bits that I'd probably have missed/regret not having a backup for if this had been a case of: wipe clean start over.   That's still a potential with this PC, as I'm not 100% convinced everything is back to proper sorts.   But what I do know: I haven't lost data, because it's backed up elsewhere.

Do yourself a favor.  Please.  Backup your stuff.  Yeah, it's not Wednesday, my normal day for pitching it.  But do it for me one more time.  Back it up.

Tell me, what's your worst tale of PC woe?   Have you ever lost data?   Have you had to start something completely over because your PC crashed, and you had neither a backup or hard copy anywhere else?

EDIT: To any guests who may be joining via Jon Gibb's post, welcome, feel free to jump on in.