That sinking feeling just after pressing the ‘Enter’ key, when you know deep down that the folder you just deleted contained all your holiday/wedding photos in a subfolder. Worse, despite all the warnings, you haven’t done a backup.

Let’s face it, backups come quite low on the importance list of computer housekeeping. Somewhere between cleaning the fan and cleaning out your old emails.

There’s no revenue generation in backups and it’s easy to find something more important to do. Facebook, news, weather, even next year’s holiday seems to be more pressing than buying a USB drive and copying your most important documents to a separate drive. That is, of course, until disaster strikes.

Data recovery

I often get asked ‘can you un-delete it?’, to which the answer is not always clear-cut. Most of the time we can recover data but the inconvenience and cost far exceed the effort required to safeguard your data in the first place. If you have deleted something by mistake, the un-delete process relies on minimal data being written to the disk after the event, meaning stop what you are doing, leave the computer running, and perform the recovery as soon as possible.

I was recently called to a ransom-ware virus case where the client had his entire documents for personal and business encrypted. We were able to recover over 95% of his files without paying the ransom but he hadn’t slept for 2 days and his view of backup importance has changed permanently.

There is also the hardware failure scenario for which data recovery is very difficult but not impossible. We now come to a tipping point of recovery cost vs data value. If your hard disk has failed physically it will need a specialist recovery company to rebuild the disk which doesn’t come cheap. Keep an eye out for the signs of noisy hard drives or corruptions on the disk which might be an indicator that something is starting to go wrong.

Which backup type

The backup specifics can be quite daunting with the different types of backup, and now Windows 10 introducing file version history. Then we need to decide which media and where the files are to be stored like a NAS, USB drive or the cloud. You can keep it simple and just copy all your files from either ‘My Documents’ or your Windows profile onto a USB hard drive that you could pick up from Officeworks for around $60. This is the simple method. It’s not a scheduled backup each week, and you may miss some files that could be useful but it’s better than doing nothing should the worst happen.

Once you have a copy of your files saved somewhere other than the computer drive itself, you now have some insurance. Well done. Don’t stop there, the next step of setting up something more regular and automated isn’t that hard. Windows has a built in backup system with a wizard that steps you through the process. Many of the USB drives now come with free backup software on the actual drive or you can download a free program like Aomi or EaseUS both of which offer much more features than a simple backup, that will help create a schedule of what and when to backup.

Where to put your backups?

Having a copy of your files is great, but that last place you want to keep them is on the computer you have just backed up. If the disk fails, or you encounter a virus which wipes your drive, it’s all gone. You need to move your backup to an external disk, or somewhere outside of the office / home. Ideally both. Imagine you keep your USB drive on a desk next to your laptop at home and you were burgled. The likelihood of someone stealing your laptop and backup disk are quite high and there’s nothing anyone can do to recover that data loss. That’s where the cloud comes in.

Cloud storage

Your secure, offsite storage from Google, OneDrive, Dropbox, Amazon or a multitude of other offerings should be your last bastion of data storage. The sign up process is quick and easy and getting cheaper each year if you need to purchase space. Use the storage space wisely and you may never need to pay for storage at all. Don’t backup items which can be obtained again elsewhere. Videos, music, IMAP emails and many programs are available to download again from the source. This will keep your storage requirements minimal and a little planning can help spread the load across different cloud storage pools.

One last point to finalise this process. At least annually, try and restore the data. This will confirm your data integrity and keep you familiar with the restore steps should you need to invoke a recovery under stress. If the above seems too daunting or you simply don’t have time, give us a call. We see too many customers chewing fingernails and panicking about those lost memories so we can’t stress enough – please, please do a backup.

Still using Apple’s QuickTime for viewing video files? It’s time to move over to something like VLC following recent press reports that there’s no patch on the digital horizon.

The short explanation is that a vulnerability was found in the QuickTime program but Apple have decided to leave it and stop issuing patches for now, and maybe into the future.  The recommendation here is that you remove the software and switch to another program to view your videos and media files. We think VLC is a great program and can play the vast number of formats on the market today.  If you are not sure that you have the program installed, have a look in your ‘Programs & Features section’ of Control Panel. If you have iTunes installed, you may well have QT installed at the same time.

For more information have a quick Google or a read of this article from Laptop Mag to uninstall QT.

Love it or not Windows 10 is here to stay. There’s a mixed bag of feedback on the latest OS from Microsoft, much coming from people who haven’t tried it yet but heard from a friend. If you are still on Windows 7 or even worse something earlier, here’s our view.

?XP was good, Vista not so great, Windows 7 smashed it, while it’s successors 8 and 8.1 tried to be everything to everyone and failed. So where does that leave W10?. Depending on whether you got there by an upgrade or new PC, your story may be very different.

We have seen a few instances of the upgrade completing but leaving a few problem areas for the user. After being incessantly nagged into the upgrade and finally giving in, there’s an expectation that it better be good, so any issues appear to be exasperated. A complete reinstall after the upgrade seems to fix many of these issues while a new PC seems quite smooth right out of the box.

One issue that first came to light was the OS snooping on your content and loss of privacy. First, who’s got a gmail / Apple account? Do you really think you have any privacy left? Microsoft is simply late to the game of content harvesting, and seen as they own your desktop OS it seems the next logical step to leverage the privacy door open.

The loss of the familiar desktop also threw some people in Windows 8 so now it’s back and you need never see the tiles again if you don’t have a touch screen. So you are basically left with a Windows 7 feel with some security upgrades and new features under the hood. What’s not to like? As long as everything is working as it should, W10 is a decent upgrade and free too. Admittedly, we have been called out to a few cries for help post upgrade but very few OS issues from a fresh install. Search rather than drilling down through menus is a quick way of finding things. We have had problems with this and Cortana. If you want to turn Cortana off you can still use the Classic Shell add-on to achieve the same functionality and take you back to the familiar Start button of previous Windows versions, obtained here.

If you are still not convinced by Windows 10 and are just getting annoyed at the popup reminding you to upgrade, you can hide it, remove it and even prevent it from coming back with this nifty utility found here in the downloads section.

Malware, viruses, pop-ups, trojans, whatever the name if you haven’t had one by now you’re pretty lucky. They are getting more sophisticated at finding ways into your computer, and smarter about preventing you removing them. Fortunately several Antivirus software companies are also lifting their game and creating programs to help tackle both the prevention and removal of these unwanted parasites.

About 2 months before your antivirus subscription is up for renewal you are likely to start getting annoying pop up messages reminding you that the antivirus company would like you to stay with their services. In a similar way to insurance companies, you may find that shopping around rather than the ‘easy-click renew’ can actually save you some dollars. Shop around for deals on multiple computers if you have several in the house, or look for discount codes that are frequently offered before you renew.

Choosing a new Antivirus

If you do feel the need to jump ship and change vendors, make sure you completely uninstall the current software and reboot prior to attempting to install another vendor package. You may need to uninstall more than one package to remove all traces of the various components of an antivirus suite, so check the ‘installed programs’ section after a reboot to confirm.

Get some feedback from reviews of your shortlisted software but be wary, some websites are have alliances to particular vendors and are not impartial. Try Amazon customer reviews paying particular attention to the issues mentioned. Some software doesn’t run well on older computers with lower memory, while other software packages may have a minimum RAM or CPU requirement.

If you find your chosen package is slowing your machine down too much, try switching off some components that are not needed. For example, if you are using Gmail for your email, Google does a great job of removing spam and viruses so you can switch off the email component of the antivirus package thus saving a little CPU and RAM resources where is wasn’t needed. If you are happy with Windows Firewall, then maybe you don’t need the firewall component of the antivirus package?

Still infected?

If some malware is still getting through, maybe start to question where you are web surfing and what content you are downloading. I know many users who don’t use an AV package at all and have remained bug free through prudent internet use and cautious browsing. That free software or app you just downloaded from overseas might be free for a reason!