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

[temporus]

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.

Comments

[jongibbs.livejournal.com]

Great post, Ed.

Back in the early 1990s in my last proper job, I ran three computer training rooms which were used by up to 2,500 people - not all at the same time of course ;) Over a period of several weeks I typed in account details and training history/preferences for almost all of them then the 20mb hard drive crashed and I lost everything :(

That was when I learned my lesson :)

[temporus.livejournal.com]

I wish I could say that it only takes once for a person to learn the lesson the hard way. Losing hours of work is never fun, for anyone, regardless of profession or whether it was for a paying job, for your hobby, or just for fun. Unforuntately, for some of us, we end up repeating the mistake, thinking each time, the last was just a fluke. It's why I always try to remind people: BACK IT UP! I bought an 8 GB SD card for like $20 this week. I saw 32 GB USB flash drives for about $50-60 range.

[dqg-neal.livejournal.com]

The problem with thinking you are safe with firewalls. Those things that they trick you into clicking on count as a process being originated from your machine. Most firewalls treats those for the most part as approved and allows the transfer through because of it. Frustrating and annoying, but many firewalls are designed that way because people want it.. they neglect to remember to enable incomming connections, so the firewall designers make it easier for you. (And as a result less protective.)

I end up clearing problems like that off workers machines all day... after they "didn't use the internet for anything at all."

[temporus.livejournal.com]

Actually, that's exactly why I put that in the post. Beacuse the average person is going to assume firewall=safe. That's not true.

On the otherhand, my local Firewall software is supposed to also detect intrusion and prevent ads and popus. And it failed at that. And the antivirus shoudl have picked up the virus process as it lauched, and failed at that.

It pays to have other tools in your toolbox. Don't rely on one vendor for all your needs.

[karen-w-newton.livejournal.com]

Hi! Came here from Jon's Friday post. If I could add, think about where the back up is. I always back up to my flash drive, but when my laptop AND flash drive were stolen, guess what? I got the laptop back, thank god, but now I rotate flash drives. I even keep one in our safe deposit box, and I occasionally email files to I have a copy in GMail, on the web,

[temporus.livejournal.com]

Great point Karen. As a Sysadmin, I always recommend that you have multiple backups, and backups in multiple locations. That's industry standard practice. Of course, since many folks I talk to aren't computer professionals, it might not occur to them.

Backup often. Backup to many different media. Disk, email, thumbdrive, CD/DVD. Remote storage. Physical printout. And yeah, keep at least one of your backups physically in a different location from your PC. There's a whole host of things, like theft, that can compromise your system. If you've got everything in the same room, anything that takes out the room (flood, fire, tornado, earthquake, robber) could take it all out.

Interesting posts about writing – w/e November 6th 2009

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