A Measure of Added Protection for your Computer

**rgsparber** · Jan 26, 2015, 07:13 AM

There is a type of assault on computers that involves encrypting your files and then demanding a ransom to have them decrypted. Doing back-ups of your important data goes a long way to protect you but only if the storage media is not continuously connected to your PC. I use an external drive to do back-ups at the same time every day. These back-ups take no longer than 2 hours. So I need this external drive on the network for these 2 hours but off of the network the rest of the time. My solution - plug the external drive's power supply into a lamp timer. For added protection, you could have a second lamp timer set to power down your modem during the time that the external drive is powered up.

**kbalch** · Jan 26, 2015, 11:19 AM

Very clever timer usage.

These sorts of assaults provide yet another check (however unnecessary) on the Mac side of the personal computing ledger…

Ken

**DIYer** · Jan 26, 2015, 07:35 PM

Clever use of timers, Rick. You must have a ton of data if you do backups daily and still need a couple of hours to do it. I admit that I don't do backups regularly. Now that I've started doing local data storage again (because of all these attacks on the cloud), I need to get that father-grandfather backup routine going.

**Christophe Mineau** · Jan 27, 2015, 02:49 AM

Hi , yes, doing local physical backup is the only way, and still , the recommendation is to have a copy stored in a remote location for important data, to protect from fire or even burglary.
For the two hours, I am surprised, it must be because you do a brute force copy/past each time you backup ?
You could use incremental tools that just update the stuff that evolved.

But it's good to restart from a new seed, maybe once a month, in case you do not realize you have a corruption in some part of your data and you start backing up it, loosing your reference doing so.

**rgsparber** · Jan 27, 2015, 07:08 AM

Thanks for the gentle poke. That 2 hours was a swag. I went back to my back-up program to look at worst case run times. I do a full system back-up quarterly and it takes 7 hours. So I now have a reminder to disable the clock timer just before that monster runs. All other back-ups are incremental and the worst case was 1-1/2 hours so 2 is safe.