Virus Blues
You don’t appreciate what you have until it’s gone- we all know it, but wow how it can still sting.
I recently caught some nasty adware/worm, possibly win32.netsky, and drove myself nuts downloading various scans and tricks trying to rid myself of the thing. Eventually I just had to try and save what files I could and nuke my OS - a complete reinstall. All is back to normal now, though I have inferior versions of some programs and am having to rebuild my music library, which regrettably didn’t make it.
The worst part of all is that I got this from a Church site! I’ve been having some doubts about my place in the thereafter recently and went shopping for a new church, when my search for the Lord brought me this nasty virtual infection. How am I to know which of the Repulican canidate has my best interest at heart if I’m not allowed to research the variations of Christianity?!?
Just kiddin’. I got it from a porn site. Skanky nasty porn gave me a skanky nasty virus. On a drunken quest for more files of this one actress, I was lead astray from my usual “safe” haunts, and when prompted to “download a needed codec”, lust got the better of my good sense, and I let the down the gates and invited the foul worm right in. But at deeper fault was my irreverent attitude about spyware: refusing to be one of those paranoid types, I’ve had what I guess is good luck to go with my cavalier attitude about virus infection all of these years of surfing. But now I’ve learned, twice shy. Don’t let it happen to you!
But it does bring to mind the deeper issues about what on your machine is most important, what you’ll miss most when it isn’t available. You can back it all up, but ultimately, you cant take it with you-
Always store your data on a separate drive, but yeah, we all know this. With a laptop this isn’t always so easy, but just buy an external drive enclosure and a hard drive and make weekly backups. If this is too difficult repartition “C:” (in your case, windows) into two partitions…the OS goes on C: and data goes on D:, that at least will confine OS problems to that partition
Another solution might be the forthcoming GDrive or other online storage. I’m using Mozy right now, althought the upload is ridiculously slow, it is cheap at 4.95 per month. This is necessary in the event that your gear is stolen, burned, etc.
I’ve been a huge fan of partitions since the good old Mac Os9 days. Operating system on one partition, data on another so the moment your OS fucks you off then it’s history without a moments concern.
Partitions at that time always had to be set up at installation, so if you didn’t set it up that way from the get go, you were borked. I hear there are tools to partition drives on an already installed windows machine, but have never used them. You ever used any of these? Personally, I’ve graduated to a drive for OS and a drive for data, but that’s not really an option with laptops.
Online solutions are not worth a damn until we get upload rates improve. It’s ok for documents, but try backing up 80Gb of music or image files and the whole idea seems mute.
Lesson? Back up and often. I use a great little program that has a free and pay version that does me right for external drive backups. SyncBack. Still, its all just ones and zeros after all.
The priests of the Temples of Syrinx have spoken-
But fear not, reader. I still respect you right and tendency to make stupid, human mistakes; including, should you so choose, the ability to shoot yourself in the foot.