No matter how diligent you are at preventing vulnerabilities and securing your environment, it's impossible to be completely secure on the Internet. What you can do is plan for how to limit the damage that people can do when they manage to compromise some part of your system. This line of thinking is called "Defense in depth" -- you can't just apply security updates and call it good.
At Freelock, we don't think one backup is enough. All kinds of things can, and often do go wrong. Murphy was an optimist, after all.
We get a lot of questions about how to fight spam. For the most part, it's too late when it reaches your email program--but on the mail server, there are several tactics we employ to minimize what reaches your inbox.
Quick quiz:
Your computer has been infected with a virus, and it deleted everything on the server. What would you do?
Send the server hard drive to a data forensic/analysis firm to see if they can recover your project data.
Recreate all your marketing material from scratch, scanning your logo and everything else.
File a law suit against Microsoft, Symantec, and Dell for letting this happen.
Call your friendly computer technician who disinfects your computers and then restores your previously backed up data from the Internet.
Carla Schroder covers a great network backup utility in her current series. Here's where the rubber meets the road:
Do Automated Cross-Platform Network Backups The Easy Way (Part 2)
Just stumbled upon a pretty cool web interface to a centralized backup system. You can manage a series of snapshot backups of all the computers on your network. It can automatically send a user an email if there's a repeated problem of missed backups.
... we've done a few rescues at Freelock Computing lately. I just stumbled across a nice article with some in-depth troubleshooting tips over at Linux Magazine.
In our previous episode, my laptop had died a spectacular death from a full cup of coffee. I had to send it into the IBM depot, where they replaced nearly everything but the battery. Including the hard drive.
Last week, my laptop died a sudden, spectacular death by drowning as a full cup of coffee poured into its keyboard. It emitted a pop sound, and the screen and all power shut off.
What would be your reaction? Mine was to immediately unplug the power cord and remove the battery. Then I took it over to the sink and poured out the coffee. Remembering tales of people flushing keyboards with water, I ran some fresh water over the keys and then set to work. I removed the keyboard, the palm rest, a few of the inner cards, and let it sit without power for several hours. Apparently not long enough.
