Back up your computer

[Lynn Eades]

Hi guys, The other day I received an email from Australia post.
I tried to open the attachment to see some details about the item. This let a Cryptolocker virus into my operating system.
I had to have the hard drive removed, cleaned out, and the programs re installed.
The cryptolocker encrypts your files. You could have paid a ransom for the key, but the U.S government closed down their site. The result is you cannot pay even if you had wanted to.
The files are unable to be saved and the result was that I ended up dumping about 3000+ images.
I was advised that these sort of viruses will, to some degree at least, get past all of the anti virus programs.
The only real answer it seems, is to do a regular back up

[Keith Webb]

What type of computer are you using Lynn?

[Lynn Eades]

Keith, It's an HP laptop.
I think the antivirus (McCafee) stopped the progress of it.

[gary_bath_jr]

Hey Lynn

You are absolutely correct, a full backup should be done of your system to be able to recover from a disaster such as you had. The best backup to do is a complete system backup so that windows and all your apps are backed up along with your files so that you do not lose anything except a bit of time. If this type of backup can not be done I would suggest getting a NAS box (Network Attached Storage) from a company called Q-NAP, they are awesome because you can get one that will let you install 4 Hard Drives and spread the data across them, say you put 4 1TB drives you would get 3TBs of storage space. This setup is good because if you get a virus on the laptop it will not get to your files on the NAS, also if one drive fails you simply pull it out and put a new one in and the device will automatically add all the data that was on the old drive to the new one.

As for AV the best ones I have seen are ESET NOD32, Bitdefender and Kaspersky, the worst I have seen are McAfee and Norton.

Just my 2 cents, BTW I have been in IT for 15 years.

Gary