Whole Life Insurance

If you make your money by using a computer, you ought to protect yourself against all computer disasters. If you were a taxi driver, you would take out car and public liability insurance. If you were an employer, you may take out plant and equipment insurance. If you were a landlord you would take out property insurance and loss of earnings insurance.

But what do you do if you work on line? Well, when you work with computers, data is your most valuable resource, but you cannot insure against losing it because you cannot prove that you ever had it. So, what can you do? The answer is that you have to have dependable backups and a number of of them.

The difficulty is that computers do not often break down so we are lulled into the false feeling of security that we can take backups tomorrow instead of right now. However, the longer that you work with IT, the more you comprehend that there are no warning signs if you are about to lose all your data, which might be your entire income stream.

For example, say you make web sites for a living and update them regularly so that the search engines find them interesting. What would happen if your hard drive crashed or if they were destroyed by a virus? You may say that you would download them from your Net host and begin again, but that is not feasible, because most HTML editors will not decompile a completed web site.

That would mean that you could never update those web sites again, so they would become less and less interesting to the search engines, so your ranking would fall and your earnings would plunge. And why? Because you failed to insure your business by taking adequate backups. You failed to make proviso for data recovery in the event of data loss.

However, no matter how frequently you backup your data on physical media, you will always be running a danger because anything physical, any device is subject to failure and deterioration. CD’s do not last as long as we were promised. I have lost loads of work that I thought was safe on CD’s and hard drives are prone to fail with no notice whatsoever.

Even if you do conquer these problems of storage, what occurs if there is a fire or a thief really steals all your disks and computers? Your hardware would be insured but your source of revenue, your data would be gone forever. All that hard work. Your source of income. Gone. Forever.

There is another alternative and that is not to hold your data on your computer, in your office or anywhere within a thousand miles of yourself. This is called cloud storage or cloud data storage. Microsoft calls it Sky Drive and offers 25 GB of free, password-protected, storage available from anywhere in the world. This kind of storage is the best in secure storage providing the best value recovery planning for computer data.

Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on many subjects, but is currently involved with researching the best virus protection software. If you have an interest in such software, please go over to our website now at Computer Antivirus Software

Most individuals are aware of the proliferation of viruses, bugs, trojans, worms, spyware and other malicious malware on the Net, but millions of people, including long-time surfers are hit every day. How can that happen, you might ask.

It so happens that, sometimes, people forget to set automatic updates of the virus database, sometimes the antivirus software is not set up properly and sometimes it just gets switched off by accident or by software.

It is not unheard of for automatic antivirus software updates to become turned off by accident or design. It has happened to me twice this year already. Luckily, Windows 7 warned me and I took notice of that admonition and, most importantly, I corrected the problem.

This is the most important point. If your computer warns you about something, particularly regarding security, do not put off doing something about it. In fact, drop what you are doing and fix the problem immediately.

If you leave you computer exposed to assault by malicious software, you will suffer. It is no use thinking that you are safe because you do not perform online banking or because you do not have sensitive information on your computer, because you have.

Your friends and colleagues entrusted you with their email addresses and names on the understanding that you safeguard their confidentiality.

Some malware only looks for the addresses in your email client software. Then it will harvest those details and spam your friends to distraction. Two of my friends let that happen this year and the only solution for both of them was to acquire a new email address and reformat their hard drive.

For example, I was receiving financial advice from my next door neighbour’s ten-year old kid. It was spam coming from Eastern Europe but it was prepared as if it came from him. He had been hacked and his address book had been sent to spammers. I had thousands of junk email for months.

And do not think that you can just make a filter to send it to the bin. You cannot, because they forge the email headers so that it seems to your anti spam software that each email comes from a different address, the result of which is that your spam filter does not recognise it as spam.

This is bad enough, but it can be a lot worse. Spyware can sit on your computer reading the keys that you press and sending the data back to the boss so that they can spam you on what you just typed.

Does that sound familiar? One day you send email to a friend saying that you are going to repaper and the next day you receive unsolicited email advertising about paint and wallpaper.

If all this sounds familiar, then you have to take action. Type ‘free anti virus software’ into a search engine and set it up in the correct manner. If you have AV software already, check the settings. You have to enable automatic updates.

If you leave your computer always switched on that is all you have to do, but if you switch it off whilst not in use, set the updates to take place when you switch it on.

Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on many subjects, but is currently involved with researching the best virus protection software. If you have an interest in such software, please go over to our website now at Computer Antivirus Software