All posts by Matthew Price

This month I’d like to talk about backing up your data, remove some of the mystery that surrounds it, and give you advice on how to back up your precious information.

A data backup is a roundabout way of saying a copy. If you have your pictures in more than one place, then you have a backup. There’s no simpler explanation to backing up than that.

Here are some of the simple and effective ways to back up your data:

•  USB Stick/Flash Drive/Pen Drive: Small memory sticks that plug into the rectangular USB socket of your computer, they can hold lots of information in a small space and a solid choice for storing smaller data such as photos.
• USB Hard Drive: The bigger brother of the USB Stick, they hold ten to twenty times as much information as a Stick, and are a great solution if you have lots of high impact data, such as video.
•  DVD: This is the older way of doing backups, before USB came along and stole the show, but still relevant today. They feature a one-time write solution, which means that once you have put data onto a DVD, it cannot be modified so you cannot accidentally delete your data after writing it to DVD.
•  Cloud Storage: This technology is relatively new, and entails storing your data online. The benefit to this is that there is no initial cost, as you do not need to buy anything to get started. Most cloud storage providers have a free system in place, and a paid version you can use if you have a lot of data to store.

Generally, the way to perform a back up is the same principle:

1. Plug the backup device in
2. Open the folder you keep your documents in (pictures, music, videos, etc)
3. Right click on the folder, and select copy.
4. Open the Backup Device.
5. Right click, and select Paste.

Once you have picked a backup solution and copied your data to it, remember to keep it updated regularly! A backup that is 6 months out of date is almost as bad as no backup at all!

I personally keep my vital documents in Cloud Storage, and then also copy it onto a USB Stick every week, this ensures that I have three copies, one on my computer, one on my USB Stick, and one in the cloud.

Remember: Everybody that has lost data have one thing in common: They weren’t prepared for it.

What makes a strong password? Generally speaking, anything that is not a word, or easy to guess based on any other information someone may have (your dogs name, for example is bad). A good password is long, 16 letters or more ideally. It has a mixture of capital and lower case letters, has numbers, and also has special characters, like ! ? @ $ &, etc.

Take these two examples, first of a bad password, second of a good password. Using our dog “Rover” who is 6 years old as the subject.

mydogrover

MyDogRover@2012

In the first example, an online calculator estimated it would take 59 minutes to decrypt the password. In the second example, 16 billion years.

Same Passwords

Too many people use the same password for every website they visit. This is incredibly bad! Any attacker only needs to crack one website password system to gain access to everything else you have! Imagine if your front door key also unlocked your car and vice versa, and someone stole your car key, they can get into your house with ease.

Due to that, you should use a different password for every website you visit. Your email, Facebook, eBay, PayPal, jigsaw puzzle site, online bingo.. all of them must be different.

How am I supposed to remember all of those?

That is the million dollar question. There are various methods you can use, all with their pro’s and con’s.

The easiest and most obvious one is to write them down in a book of some kind. This has the ease of being accessible and on hand in the place you need it, at home. However, be aware that it only takes 15 seconds for someone to steal the book, or take photos of the pages. So if you do wish to write them down, keep that piece of paper safe!

Most web browsers offer to store your password for you. This has the benefit of being able to log you in automatically, plus you don’t have to remember anything at all. The downside is that if someone was to steal your computer, they can retrieve these passwords, as most browsers do not encrypt them either. There are multiple tools on the web that can search and save these passwords, so be careful.

The other method is to use a dedicated password manager. These work by only asking you for one password (so make it a really strong one!) it will then save your passwords in a secure encrypted fashion, so if someone did get access to your computer, without your “master password” they still cannot do anything! There are many free solutions available such as LastPass or KeePass.