Here are some things you might want to think about.

I remember my first hit at about age 30 where I suffered a head crash on a drive attached to a commodore 64. Having a totally disorganized backup procedure I got lucky and found a backup 1 week old. Interestingly enough I was able to redo that solid week of programming work in about a day. I had my 2nd hit when the power supply on my machine instantly fried the whole machine (well 2 disk drives and 5 other components instantly gone). I lost absolutely nothing because the first hit taught me a lesson and I had taken a backup just before the machine got fried. I also had another machine catch on fire but I turned off the power pretty fast :-) while my daughter was flying through the house at high speed to get the fire extinguisher. Again I lost nothing. After the 2nd hit I started backing up across the home network to other machines and after the fire I started taking backups off site. I use to take uncompressed CD backups every so often of the really critical data (mainly market trading software I developed with a year+ of work behind it) and put them in a safety deposit box. I have never had to use these so I have gotten a bit lazy and I think my last one runs back maybe 3 years. We tend to only do what we need to do.

I worked with a programming buddy for a while. His daughter was at home while he was at work. His house had a break in and she hid in the closet without a cell phone. They backed a van up to the house, opened the garage door and in about 2 hours cleaned anything of value out of the house (stereos, computers, etc). I guess they we not interested in ladies cloths in the closet...lol. Lucky daughter. I had a break-in once too. Kids took light things only (do you have a light notebook at home while you are at work).

I think these three experiences are why I don't rely on Microsoft (Malware is not the only threat). Having protected myself successfully from computer losses for about 30 years without help from Microsoft and during this thread having done a bit of reading on malware in all its different types I have decided to remove some of the laziness of late and tighten my backup procedure.

1/
I have better documented my backup procedure in my reminder database. My current procedures and any new procedures. It will ensure any changes are actually kept up.

2/ In addition to double image backups after clean installs (before online and after online) and many times a day programming backups and daily backups across three machines I have decided to take a weekly DATA only backup of data to a large terabyte drive with the folders labelled Machine-MM-Week# (giving a yearly rotation) then a monthly DATA only backup to a 2nd terabyte drive with folders labelled Machine-YYYYMM giving a rotation until full. These external backups will be kept unplugged at all times except during backup and restore. They will not be compressed so there should be no issues with returning to a brand new machine.

So if at any time my three machines are knocked out by a ransomware because the drives are off-line I probably will only loose a weeks data. In the unlikely case of the ransomware compressing the external drives (all of the drive) I will have protection against infect-to-attack delay of < 1 week and infect-to-attack delay of < 1 month. The monthly machine will be stored off-site to provide fire protection. The weekly machine will be stored at my fire-escape route also protecting against file assuming I make it out :-) If a fire occurs while I am away from the house I loose a month worth of work and I buy new computers and possibly buy some new software (in comes the insurance).

One last one. Intel announced a chip security flaw a while back.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2018-01-04/intel-chip-flaw-a-security-threat/9303280
I am not worried about it.

One last idea you might want to think about. Store your financial passwords in the safety deposit box after memorizing them (someone could break in and steal them or a fire could wipe them out in the computer or on paper). I have a huge one and way of keeping it in memory. I can break it into chunks and have a way to remember what chunk goes where. If you type fast you can use all of it for the most critical password.



Last edited by bowlesj; 06/22/18 03:51 AM.

John Bowles
My playing in my 20s:
https://www.reverbnation.com/johnbowles