Free Technology Zone

In the last few days there has been reports of a worm designed to wipe out your data.  CNET reports that this worm has already targetted US and South Korean web sites.  The worm travels through emails which has an attachment.  The email is basically a trojan with a payload designed to erase files on your computer–including the master boot record.  When installed on your computer, the malicious load with will basically render your computer inoperable on the next boot.

Don’t wait until this happens to you.  Take action; backup your precious files (documents, pictures, videos).  You have several options.

If you don’t have too many files to back up (i.e. less than 2GB), a free account at mozy.com would do the job.  They provide 2GB of free online backup storage space; however, for unlimited space it is only $4.95 per month!  However, if you are cheap like me, you can try to convince others to to sign up for their free 2GB as well, and you’ll get an additional 250MB of storage space for every referral!

There are other online backup solutions like elephantdrive.com and carbonite.com; however, these don’t provide an initial free online storage space.

The other approach is to simply buy a flash drive or an external high capacity USB drive.  There are many out there.  I’ve seen flash drive with capacities as high as 32GB, but I’m sure there are higher capacity units out there now.  You can buy external USB drives now with over 1TB of storage space for less than $200.  As a matter of fact, I recently purchased one at Best Buy.  Over two weeks ago, I completed a full backup of my drives containing years of accumulated documents and pictures.

I know that if by some chance my drive crashes or I am infected by one of this worm, I’ll have my backup to fall back on.

So don’t wait too long before backing up your data.  Get that peace of mind that you have something to fall back to should the worst happen to your hard drive.

One of the worst things that can happen to you is to lose a flash drive.  The one thing that can is even worst than that is if teh flash drive has confidential information.

Enter TrueCrypt!

TrueCrypt is an encryption product that will allow you to create a secure file which you can access like a drive (e.g. drive G:, M:, or whatever you choose it to be).  In order to mount it like a drive you need to supply a passphrase–which you setup when you build a TrueCrypt file volume.

If you save the TrueCrypt file on a USB flash drive and access it like a drive, you can store your confidential files there.

If you ever lose this flash drive, no one can access the confidential data you have in the TrueCrypt file because they are encrypted.  That solves your problem.  The only thing you need to make sure you do now is make backups of your data so you can recover them should you lose your flash drive; and you won’t have to worry about others seeing your confidential files!