Keep your data available: Make backup copies regularly

The fifth security recommendation to protect your home PC is simple: get all your valuable data stored in your computer and make a copy in another media (e.g. in writable optical disks or USB memory drives) to have them available in case your hard disk stops working unexpectedly.

Using your PC at home, you will soon start storing data on your hard disk. A remarkable subset of these data, if not all, is surely important to you and its sudden disappearance could mean that you have to spend a lot of time recovering or re-creating them if that is at all possible (e.g. photos, music files, spreadsheets, etc.).

There is a simple measure to prevent you from losing data even if your hard disk crashes or simply, your PC (or laptop) is stolen: make a backup copy of your valuable data. And make it regularly.

Nowadays, it is easy to get different data storage media with lots of available space for your copies. Three examples of storage media are writable CDs, DVDs and USB memory drives. It is possible to store around 600 MB in a writable CD. A writable DVD is the equivalent of more than 6 CDs. A typical USB memory drive has a similar capacity as one or several CDs.

Before copying your data, you need to know where they are stored in your PC. Try to store your data in an easy-to-find folder e.g. place all your data hanging from a folder named ‘mydata’ or even in a different drive (e.g. in Windows, typically the operating system is in the C drive, then try to place your data in a different drive e.g. D if possible, use a different hard disk). This way, if you need to re-install the operating system, you will still find your data files.

There are many ways to copy files e.g. just drag and drop them using a file explorer. If your data is confidential, then encrypt them before copying them into a new media. This way, if you lose the CD or the USB drive, then the individual who finds it will not access the content easily.

An easy way to encrypt files and folders is ticking the ‘256-Bit AES encryption’ option present when selecting ‘encrypt added files’ in Winzip. With this option, you achieve an (almost) similar protection than the hardware-based encryption present in the secure USB drives.

Just an important detail, do not forget your encryption password!

And this is it, as proposed in the very first article, now you can have a reasonably secure PC at home with:

- An updated and patched operating system.
- A running and updated antivirus program.
- An active personal firewall installed.
- An anti-malware or anti-adware software installed.
- And available backup copies of your data.