The Dreaded Virus

Sorry I haven't been around for awhile but I got a virus on my desktop last Monday.  Being as though I am in school full time I couldn't attack the situation full time until this weekend.  More specifically a Trojan Horse.  I haven't gotten a virus in over five years but it happens to the best of us.  My virus protection suite, Microsoft Security Essentials, did a fair enough job of finding the Trojan Horse and claimed to have cleaned it but after I did a full scan it still kept popping up.  The final straw is when I went to youtube in Internet Explorer and the page was in Korean.  Now I consider myself pretty proficient with hardware and software but when it comes to viruses, trojan horses, etc I'm not going to try and fix the situation, I'm going to nuke my hard drive and start over. 

Fortunately my style of computing has lent itself to emergency data recovery.  I keep almost all of my documents as .txt files which are non executables.  100% safe.  I keep all of my .txt files in a single folder called Text Files.  Very small.  Email yourself a copy (to gmail, yahoo, hotmail, etc) of these files every week or so.  Important data backed up. 

If you have to use Word, Excel, Powerpoint docs once you are done with them save them to Google Docs or to Microsoft Skydrive once finished.  Skydrive is a little more impressive in that you get 25 GB in storage. It may take a while to move all your docs over but once you do all you have to do is move them one-by-one once you create you create or receive docs.

You can use these options for othere files as well.  Say you backup your Quicken or Quickbooks often.  Just zip it up either email it to yourself or send it to your Skydrive.  If you are doing to do some serious backup I would use the SkyDrive option.  You will start filling up your email box pretty quickly if you fill it up with a lot of data.  Keep these data limits in mind:

• SkyDrive: 25GB Storage, 50MB File Size Limit
• Gmail: Currently 7+ GB Storage, 25 MB File Size Limit
• Yahoo Mail:  Unlimited Storage, 25 MG File Size Limit
• Hotmail: (Also Known As MSN or Live) EveryGrowingStorage*, 25 GB File Size Limit

The great thing about these above options is when you upload and download your files from them you can guarantee your files are virus free.  (You have to use one of the big three email services Yahoo, MSN, Gmail).

For photos why not use Flickr?  It's what I use.  I don't have a whole bunch of photo's but I can keep them forever there. 

Me personally, I don't care too much about music and video.  I like to listen to my music with Rhapsody which is a streaming service so I don't have to save large files and I use Netflix so I can stream my movies.  By that is it may, you may want to acquire an external hard drive for you media files.  But this isn't something you already don't know.  :)

I do hope the tips I showed above about backing up your data was useful. 

Next step I will show you the foolproof OLD SCHOOL method for removing a virus.