Putting the Byte into Beef 2015
Well Beef Week went really well – with unbeatable weather and huge crowds it is a credit to the organisers. Sure the traffic on the new bridge was slow at times however this is the same as Brisbane every day of the week (not just 5 days out of every 3 years)!
We survived the week well and met lots of customers that we had only previously talked to over the phone. The main thing for us is that Beef Australia had uninterrupted access to their computers and documents during the entire event. I also want to thank our local customers for holding off for the week with any non-urgent problems.
Worthy of mention this week is that we notice that Cryptolocker (also called Cryptowall) is still doing the rounds and still catching lots of people out. This mostly occurs when you open an email attachment that you shouldn’t have opened. One of the handy hints that we are suggesting to customers is to have a web based email account e.g. [email protected] and point non-work related emails to that account. This has a twofold positive effect and can be just as beneficial for home users too.
Firstly this helps to free up your main account for only work related emails – or if you are a home user, for just the senders that you consider important. You then get far less spam to your main email address. I would suggest that any sign ups to online vendors be directed toward this ‘secondary’ email address.
The second important factor is that if you do get an email attachment that is sent to your main account and if you are unsure if it could be important then you can forward it to your Gmail account and open it with far greater safety in a web browser – instead of unleashing it directly into your PC. If you get into the habit of doing this as a safe email practice it could well save you one day from viruses such as CryptoLocker.
The other obvious thing which still gets overlooked by many is to keep creating an up-to-date backup of your important data. This does not only apply to future victims of Cryptolocker but we still have EVERYONE from Uni students to larger companies putting themselves at risk. We ask the question of every customer that we see “how do you backup your important data” and we are still often answered with a blank look.
What are you trying to protect yourself from here? You are trying to avoid data loss from the following events – getting a bad virus like Cryptolocker, having a hard drive mechanically fail, having a hard drive lose its partitioning table, having a bad windows corruption, having your PC stolen, leaving your laptop in a Taxi, having your PC wrecked by a power surge, dropping your laptop on a hard surface or in the drink, having rain / water get into your PC from a storm – or even a cyclone!
There are many reasons to run a good backup system and if you already have a spare external hard drive then we can setup a simple backup system that will take around 20 seconds to run when you double click on a single icon – it is that simple!
Future Byte Me topics can be emailed to [email protected] and Bruce is contactable at Kerr Solutions, 205 Musgrave Street or on 49 222 400.
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