A Measure of Added Protection for your Computer

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.

Very clever timer usage.

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

Ken

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.

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.

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.

That's still a lot of data, Rick! For a home setup I mean.