by Darren Baguley
08 April 2016
One of the advantages of freelance journalism is that a computer of some sort, mobile phone and broadband are all that’s needed to get started. The corollary of this is that our lives are now in our computers. That’s fine when everything is working as it should, but what happens when disaster strikes – a computer or hard drive dies or is stolen or smashed?
Here are a few tips to reduce the risk of disasters and the impact if one does happen.
1. Buy anti-virus software rather than using free versions.
Even if you’re a Mac user and think you don’t need anti-virus etc, there are internet threats that have nothing to do with your operating system. Any of the major brands – Norton, Trend Micro, AVG, McAfee, Kaspersky, Bitdefender – will do the job for around the same price as long as they’re kept up to date. The free versions are good for a spare laptop stashed in a wardrobe, but not for your main machine.
2. Become really security conscious.
The best internet security package in the world is useless if you click willy-nilly on an .exe file or visit an infected website. Most malware relies on a user to do things like this, so it pays to know the risks and take care of what you do click on / look at. Small businesses like ours can also be the target of phishing and various forms of malware including ransomware – and even experienced users aren’t immune.
Some hackers will go to a lot of effort to target particular groups. As an example, I recently received an email that seemed to be from a well-known journalism-related group. I’m on the mailing list, the link said something about awards so I didn’t think twice, I clicked on it. Lucky for me my internet security blocked a phishing site which may have infected my machine with malware, stolen my personal details and so on.
3. Do those annoying software updates. Seriously.
I know they’re a pain, but keep your operating system up to date with the latest patches. By all means put off non-essential updates such as drivers, but important security related updates you should install asap. If you have a PC that’s running Windows XP, upgrade it immediately or don’t connect to the internet. XP is out of support and your PC is a danger to your business and the rest of us on the internet.
4. Backup regularly. Don’t whinge – just do it.
You should have a big, fast external hard drive to back up to. Too small and it will fill up too fast and be annoying to manage. Many hard drives come bundled with backup software so you’ve got no excuse for not backing up your machine.
How often depends on how busy you are, so a good rule of thumb to ask yourself is: how much work would you lose in a day? A week? Think about setting it up to copy an image of your whole computer rather than just the files. It will take more space and be slower but if your hard drive dies you can restore everything onto the new drive or PC. If you just back up your files, you’ll need to reload all your applications as well as your files, a pain-in-the-ass job that can take a couple of days and gigabytes of bandwidth.
5. Consider paying for an online backup to be extra sure.
While it’s important to do a backup to an external hard drive so that a ‘bare metal’ restore doesn’t take a couple of days, online backup services such as Carbonite and Mozy are also useful. For an inexpensive yearly subscription, these services will back up your files but not your applications online. They’ll also save your files in the event of your full backup being corrupted as can sometimes happen.
6. Put all your really important stuff in the cloud.
DropBox, Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive are all incredibly useful for allowing you to access your work from various devices but also for having another backup copy of really important files. Think your clips (especially if you’ve thrown out the hard copies), software licence serial numbers, invoicing records and other financials. Basically, anything that would cause you a great deal of time and angst to recreate if you lost it should be backed up to the cloud.
How good are you at being your own IT manager? Any tips to add? We’d love to hear them in the comments.
Great piece Darren. It couldn’t have come at a more opportune moment as I have been plagued with Tech gremlins of late. I’ll certainly be keeping a close eye on these areas in the future.
Thanks Leo. Sorry to hear you’ve had dramas lately. Some other suggestions which I chopped out of the blog for space reasons, and because they’re a bit techie, is to partition your hard drive so your OS and apps are on one hard drive and files are on another. That way if necessary you can rebuild the OS without affecting your files. Another is to have a second OS on your machine (Windows/Linux, OSX/Windows or Linux) so that if one OS has a conniption and you’re on deadline you can switch to the other.