Family and Friends, please pay attention – Backups

Family and Friends, please pay attention. This is very important and could save you a lot of frustration and emotional heart breaks.

People’s lives are stored on computers and devices. Every one takes digital photos, and most people save them on computers. Some do not even do that and just leave it on phones. I want you to think about this for a minute. Where are your wedding photos and video’s? What about your children’s important moments like school performances, sporting events and birthdays?  What about the photos of loved ones, boyfriends, girl friends, husbands, wives and parents.

I hope I have your attention and have you thinking now. So hear me out as an IT professional. Most people do not make backups. The people that do make backups use manual methods that are not consistent; myself I am just as guilty. My Time keeps reminding me it has been 43 days as of when I write this of my last backup. (I am actually safe because I use iCloud as well).

Two reasons off the start why this is not good enough if you are one of those people that thinks they are backing up.

  • It is manual, you will eventually forget to do it, or get complacent because nothing has happened and stop doing it.
  • This hardly protects you, except for if you accidently delete a file or your hard drive crashes or you lost your laptop.

The concerns are, natural disaster and your home is destroyed. Think wild fires for small towns, floods near rivers, a house fire, earth quakes and super hero’s from space fighting it out on your lawn. Ok I admit I watch to many marvel movies. The greatest concern these days is ransomware viruses. These are viruses that infect your computer, encrypt all the files and they demand payment to restore it. A regular external hard drive plugged in USB is not immune to this at all. It will become part of the encrypted mess thus, your backups are gone too.

The only solution is to have two kinds of backups, one that is offsite and the local one to be inaccessible to the user. It is such a small price to pay to preserve such a important part of your life.

Now I work for a IT company and we offer protection for a very affordable price. But this isn’t about bringing business to the company I work for. I want my friends and family to be safe so I will tell you what you need to do on your own but would encourage you to use my company. If not for yourself think about parents and grand parents that are not tech savvy that could use our help.

Step 1: Get a network attached storage device. They care called a NAS. If this is your only method of backup you should get one with two hard drives. If you will be using offsite backups as well then you can get away with a single drive but it is not recommended.

Step 2: Configure the device with a login account with a secure password.

Step 3: Configure backup software to connect to it via this secure login. The software is totally free for Windows Computers, and Mac’s have many options to. DO NOT set this up as a drive to use for yourself. It is only for backups. The second you make it a mounted drive you lose protection from Viruses.

Step 4: Setup internet backups in the cloud. I can provide this for a very cheap monthly price and our data center is located here in BC, so nothing is going out of the country. But you can also use Dropbox, Apple iCloud, Microsoft OneDrive and so on.

I really don’t care which of the cloud providers you use, each have different strengths and weaknesses. The NAS box I recommend has the ability to sync up to these services directly as well making this process automated. FYI my company offers as much storage for the same prices.

So that is my rant, think about how important your files are, besides pictures work files, documents and receipts and other things. You might be thinking I am safe, all my photos are in my facebook. Well that is true until you get banned or hacked.

Single Drive NAS box that can also connect to online services like DropBox to automate offsite backups

Prices are as of the posting of this, they can change in the future and is a guide only. Small shipping charge for sending completed units, NAS box plus Hard Drives setup. Setting up the backup system which is done remotely over the internet has a small charge as well.

Qnap 1 Bay, I can do for $230 plus Tax (No Hard Drive)

http://www.ncix.com/detail/qnap-ts-131p-1-bay-personal-cloud-94-137848.htm

Qnap 2 Bay, I can do for $275 plus Tax (No Hard Drives)

http://www.ncix.com/detail/qnap-ts-231p-2-bay-personal-cloud-fe-137847.htm

Hard Drives, for the 2 Bay NAS you need two Hard Drives.

1 TB Ironwolf Hard Drive, I can do for $85 plus tax

http://www.ncix.com/detail/seagate-ironwolf-st1000vn002-1tb-sata-15-135300.htm

2 TB Ironwolf Hard Drive, I can do for $120 plus Tax

http://www.ncix.com/detail/seagate-ironwolf-st2000vn004-2tb-sata-e6-135301.htm

3 TB Ironwolf Hard Drive, I can do for $148 plus Tax

http://www.ncix.com/detail/seagate-ironwolf-st3000vn007-3tb-sata-d1-135302.htm

4 TB Ironwolf Hard Drive, I can do for $182 plus Tax

http://www.ncix.com/detail/seagate-ironwolf-st4000vn008-4tb-sata-15-135303.htm

6 TB Ironwolf Hard Drive, I can do for $285 plus Tax

http://www.ncix.com/detail/seagate-ironwolf-st6000vn0041-6tb-sata-f9-136977.htm

8 TB Ironwolf Hard Drive, I can do for $365 plus Tax

http://www.ncix.com/detail/seagate-ironwolf-st8000vn0022-8tb-sata-e9-136979.htm

10 TB Ironwolf Hard Drive, I can do for $500 plus Tax

http://www.ncix.com/detail/seagate-ironwolf-st10000vn0004-10tb-sata-4e-134127.htm

The recommended software for Windows computers I suggest is Veeam Endpoint Backup. It is free but you do have to register with a real email address to get the download link.

https://www.veeam.com/windows-endpoint-server-backup-free.html

Lastly, you can use corporate level high protection Antivirus for a fraction of the price, I can make it available to home users. You do not get the managed service for this price, which is central monitoring by our security department for problems. Nevertheless, this Antivirus has special capabilities that help protect from ransomware viruses. However, nothing is perfect so the most important thing is backups.

You can watch the video of this antivirus here at https://www.computerworks.ca/webroot-secureanywhere/

The filter add on for the Internet Browser does a good job keeping users safe. The file monitoring it does on unknown files and roll back capability of changes my by those unknown untrusted files is the strong point of why its better to use a paid product over free antivirus that comes with Windows.

I can offer this for $60 a year per computer, for more then 3 I can offer a small discount.

If you have read all this, good on you. If you do not want to use my company for your personal security needs then by all means use what I have posted above to secure yourself. At the end of the day I want my friends and family and the friends and family of my friends to be safe. I provided retail links to the recommended devices and hardware, my suggestions for setup is listed. The free backup software is linked and some people already have lots of online storage already and can use it for backups. If you do want this professionally setup and to use the services the company I work for by all means contact me.

Windows 10 release date and more

My Computer has alerted me to the free upgrade through Windows Notification area and it appears Windows 10 is available on July 29th of this year. You can reserve your free copy via email. Now I wonder how this works with people who have more then one computer like myself.

windows10message windows10message2

Installing Skype on a 64bit Debian Box

Installing 32 bit Skype on a 64 bit Debian Box

Skype only comes in 32 bit so for any one that installs Debian 64 bit they will need to do a little work to get Skype up and running.

First thing you want to do is obtain Skype. You can do this at skype.com Go to Downloads and select “Choose your distribution” and pick from the drop down menu “Debian 7.0 (Multiarch)”

Screen Shot 2015-02-04 at 5.44.51 PM

 

After you have it downloaded you need to open up Terminal

su (so you are root, you will need your root password)

dpkg –add-architeture i386 (You need to add support for i386 since skype is only a 32 bit application)

apt-get upgrade (This ensures everything is up to date)

dpkg -i “skype-debian…..” (hit tab to complete it. Or type the entire file name out that you downloaded. )

If you have a error about un-met dependencies which occurred for me then run this command

apt-get install -f

Now run

dpkg -i “skype-debian…..”

After it is done installing you will find it in the Internet Folder ready to use.

 

Microsoft previews Windows 10 today

Microsoft will let the cat out of the bag today with new details about the next Windows operating system known as Windows 10 today.

Microsoft unveiled Windows 10 in September but is expected to share a lot more today which will be streamed at 9 am pacific time. Some of the expected speakers at the event include CEO Satya Nadella; Terry Myerson, Joe Belfiore and Phil Spencer.

Windows 10 will follow Windows 8 skipping the name Windows 9. We should be able to welcome back the missed and loved start menu which was torn away from Windows 8, which in my opinion lead to a lot of people not upgrading to Windows 8.

It is my hope Windows 10 will address many of the problems found and created in Windows 8.

http://news.microsoft.com/windows10story/

 

Google Drive and Google Scanning

I’ve been scanning all my paperwork I have collected for YEARS so I could toss out the paper copies and go to digital copies for reference if I ever needed. I just looked up an old document I made on Google drive which happens to be the place I decided to store my scanned documents. Now these are PDFs but basically photos. No optical recognition used in the scan. Google parsed every PDF and used OCR on them because when I search for stuff some of those PDFs with matching words come up in the results. I tested a couple words that would only be in the PDFs scanned. Sure enough they came up. So that means Google is performing an index scan and using OCR technology to parse the files for relevant and useful information on anything you upload to Google Drive. In one way this concerns me, mostly because I didn’t know, though I should have assumed it. This as a side benefit that is really useful for me because I scanned over 2300 documents and didn’t title them or sort them (yet) so being able to search is very beneficial.