by Kevin J. Fry

The Most Important Information Introduction

Technologies evolve so quickly it seems that once you purchase the latest thing, a new / better technology comes out the next day. This chapter is dedicated to what you need to know to protect your information, your security, putting information into your computer, retrieving it, backing it up, the Internet, and preventative maintenance for your hardware. The combination of all of these things will protect yourself from intrusion, keeping yourself organized, being safe with the Internet and e-mail, making your computer last, and making sure you’re ready if the worst case scenario happens. These days, people are very worried about security and identity theft, mainly because there is so much, and information is so readily available in most cases. Some of the most important information can be seen by securing yourself from these particular items, and at the same time, making sure you don’t loose anything. So, combining these two issues is backing up your information, as well as making sure your information is protected by other people and prying eyes.

The Most Important Information Backing Up Information

Did you ever have it happen where you working on something for about an hour, typing, and typing, and all of the sudden, your computer shuts off, or locks up, and you forgot to save. Well, imagine a year of information on your computer and you get a virus or your hard drive fails to respond anymore. The feeling can be very frustrating and angry because all of this information that has been collecting is now gone, and all of that hard work for nothing. It can be costly for an expert to go into your hard drive and extract information onto another hard drive, and even then, you may not completely recover everything. The way to prevent this from happening is to invest in something to back up your information. Maybe even back it up twice. If you back something up twice, you're able to keep one copy on your computer, one in the house, and one away from your house if in fact the unforeseen does in fact happen. All of your important data would still be accessible. There are so many resources for you to use these days to back up your information. There are CDs and DVDs that would allow you to store information on a ROM. There are Zip drives that would allow you to back up information as well as USB flash drives, SD/Flash memory cards. There are many ways of backing up information. By exporting your information to many different file types. If you're in Microsoft Word, you can backup this one file as an earlier version, and possibly a standard text file. You may also consider creating the file as a PDF. So there you have three different file types. A Microsoft word file, a text file, and an Adobe Acrobat file. Now, where do you store these files? I recommend as many locations as possible. There are different types of devices that hook up to your computer to store information which I will go over with here. The first is your hard drive. A separate folder on your hard drive called 'My Backups' that could be located in the 'My Documents' folder. Here you could export the three file types mentioned above for every file that you've created, or have been working on. Your work is important, and that's the main focus to backup your records. If you follow the directions on how to name your files, this issue should be easy to follow. Another backup option to save these items on diskette. This is not a very good solution mainly due to the fact that disks only hold a little more than 1MB of data. Zip drives are another option you may consider. These drives can be installed like a floppy drive in your computer. They hold more information than floppy drives, and the information stored can vary as far as capacity. The CD-ROM or DVD ROM drives are other options to back up information. These too vary in size. The good thing about placing all of your backup information in one folder is that you can check how much disk space is used to store all of this information. After you have placed all of your files in this folder, you may want to check the disk space that your backups require, and find the backup media type that would be best for you. Other options include a flash drive. This device is able to store gigabytes of information, on a small device about the size of a lighter, if not smaller. One thing to consider is how often you will back up. If you do back up weekly, you may want to consider CD/DVD-ROM because of the cost of the CDs themselves. More options of backing up information could be transferring files to the Internet. If you do have a high speed connection, you can transfer your files nightly, to a server that you have access to. Pictures and sound files should also be backed up. If you do have these files, you may want to back these files up onto another form of media. SD cards, memory sticks, and other devices like them can be plugged into your PDA, digital camera, and even your printer, as another option of backup. Prices for these cards are pretty low considering the space they take up, and how much they hold. There are other forms of media backup you may consider for what you're backing up. I urge you to take an inventory of your hard drive, and the information you want backed up, and find the solution that's right for you, and or your business. Upon backing up information, there are also compression options you can use by using the ZIP format you often see when downloading information off of the Internet. Also consider that since you're backing up all of this information, that you may want to password protect or encrypt these items, to ensure your personal information is protected from prying eyes or intruders. Where do you store these items once they're backed up? There are several locations you can store these items. One place that would be close would be a fire and flood proof box stored in your house. There are many forms of these boxes. Some are safe like, some just require a key to open them up. A friend's house is another good place to store information. Some place off site would be beneficial, and if it is a friend's house (depending on how much you trust this friend, you may want to use encryption or password protection on the items) you may be able to teach them your healthy paranoia regarding the backups you make. This should be the same for businesses. You may want to store your business information backups at your house. Another place to store information backups is at your local bank, in a safe deposit box. You can also rent a storage unit and keep records there as well. Organization is a key part no matter what, depending on how much you back up, where you back it up, and what you're backing up your information on, there are so many options, but ultimately, you need to decide on the backup solution for yourself. Software is another story. You should have license information stored with your CD-ROM and in a safe location. You may want to back up this software onto another CD or something like that. Instead of backing up your entire hard drive with all of your settings that can be changed. It would be best to have the software backed up, or on another CD-ROM because these items can always be re-installed. Your operating system and all of your software is something that could be re-installed and backing up your entire hard drive as an image would not necessarily be the best solution due to space. And if you do have to start over, you will be able to sort through the files you need, and transfer them over, in a easy directory structure you can understand. You may think that I'm crazy for giving all of these options, and maybe paranoid at the same time because of all of the file formats and the locations you can store these backed up files. But unforeseen circumstances to happen, and to ensure yourself that your information is backed up properly, and that your information is protected, you could save years of information from being destroyed in a fire, in a flood, or some other form of disaster such as a hard drive malfunction.

Start Quote From: http://www.microsoft.com/protect/yourself/data/what.mspx

How to decide what data to back up There are many ways you can unintentionally lose information on a computer. A child playing the keyboard like a piano, a power surge, lightning, floods. And sometimes equipment just fails. If you regularly make backup copies of your files and keep them in a separate place, you can get some, if not all, of your information back in the event something happens to the originals on your computer. Deciding what to back up is highly personal. Anything you cannot replace easily should be at the top of your list. Before you get started, make a checklist of files to back up. This will help you determine what to back up, and also give you a reference list in the event you need to retrieve a backed-up file. Here are some file suggestions to get you started:

• Bank records and other financial information
• Digital photographs
• Software you purchased and downloaded from the Internet
• Music you purchased and downloaded from the Internet
• Personal projects
• Your e-mail address book
• Your Microsoft Outlook calendar
• Your Internet Explorer bookmarks

If you haven't already decided where you want to store your backup copies—external hard disk drive, CDs, DVDs, or some other storage format—and you want to know more about your options, you can read about the types of external storage available. After you've decided what you want to back up and where you're going to back up, you're ready to learn how to back up.

End Quote accessed 2007-07-16

The Most Important Information: Firewall & Proxy

Start quote from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firewall_(networking) A firewall is a hardware or software device which is configured to permit, deny or proxy data through a computer network which has different levels of trust. End Quote accessed 2007-07-16 Start Quote From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_server In computer networks, a proxy server is a server (a computer system or an application program) which services the requests of its clients by forwarding requests to other servers. A client connects to the proxy server, requesting some service, such as a file, connection, web page, or other resource, available from a different server. The proxy server provides the resource by connecting to the specified server and requesting the service on behalf of the client. A proxy server may optionally alter the client's request or the server's response, and sometimes it may serve the request without contacting the specified server. A proxy server that passes all requests and replies unmodified is usually called a gateway or sometimes tunnelling proxy. A proxy server can be placed in the user's local computer or at specific key points between the user and the destination servers or the Internet. End Quote accessed 2007-07-16 Measures should be taken to secure your computer to make sure other people around the world can not gain access to your private information. Most anti-virus programs have tools for you to prevent attacks against your computer such as firewall and proxy programs that will allow you to secure your information. Stay away from programs such as peer-to-peer networks and when you are putting information on web sites, be sure to (especially when using credit card and social security numbers) make positive that the web site is secure, meaning that communication between your computer and theirs is encrypted. These programs are for two main reasons, a proxy server will provide a gateway for you to prevent people from gaining access to your IP address and attacking your computer directly, by allowing ports to become blocked. A firewall prevents access to information on a network, and will let you know when a specific program is trying to access the Internet to send information to another computer or network. These are important pieces of software. A firewall will protect open ports and programs trying to access the Internet. Will allow you to Norton Internet Security runs about $70 USD. software of firewall and proxy servers Sometimes the best firewall is keeping up to date with your operating system’s software updates. Depending on your operating system, there are ways of protecting your information. Sometimes the best firewall is not having that computer accessed by the Internet at all. Firewalls are mainly used by corporations with company secure documents and account information, but the personal user may want to invest in some kind of solution to keep other people, hackers and crackers, from even seeing that your computer exists, and if in fact it does exist, that they can’t break into it (take control of any information). Along the same lines as firewall and proxy servers are applications such as net nanny that keep track of what you view on the Internet. These programs are in place to keep your children from visiting dangerous sites that they should not be looking at. Another item of topic is Phishing which exists. This is when you get an e-mail from your bank. It seems like it is from your bank telling you to log in and confirm your account information. Say your bank is Wachovia. You get an e-mail from Wachovia saying that you need to log in and confirm security information. This is where phishing comes in. You see a convient link to their web site and it looks like http://www.wachovia.com/ but it actually comes up as: http://www.wachvia.com.1234.fdh2.someotherdomain.com/ When you click on that link, you see a web page that looks like the actual bank’s web site, but you’re actually on someone elses web site that wants to capture your username and password. Be very cautious when visiting sites such as this. I personally like to log into those sites with usernames and passwords as curse words and notes to the web site owner that this is the FBI or the CIA, and that their IP address is being logged, and by viewing this information we’ll be at your house shortly. Ha ha to them.

The Most Important Information: Anti-Virus

Virus run rapid on-line and it's easy to get a virus from downloading files. There are many kinds of different viruses and may of them do so many different things. By having one of these programs running, you will ensure that these files are protected from doing any damage. It's a mere safeguard to know who you are visiting on-line and know exactly who is sending your files via e-mail. You should try to stay away from any executable files, and files that will run programs, scripts, macros, etc. There are even viruses in Microsoft Word files. The most important thing to remember is that there are some files you can trust, like document standards. There are some files that can not do any harm to your computer like TXT, PDF, XML, JPG (unless there are images you don't want to look at). Be careful with some of these items though, a file can be named look_at_me.pdf.exe and some computers would hide the .EXE from site, making you think that the file is a PDF when it is really an executable. There are two main anti-virus programs out there, Norton, and Symantec. These software packages can also be coupled / packaged with other utilities such as firewall, proxy, spy ware, etc. Although these software programs cost money, some of them may come with a new computer, which would make it free. Which is a very nice word when talking about computer software. There are also other free anti-virus programs on the Internet that you can download from safe web sites. Avast offers a free anti-virus program for home users. This is an alternative program for those who don’t want to spend money for the protection you have a right to. Norton Anti-Virus runs about $40 for a one year license. This license allows you to download updates of new viruses for one year. There is also the Norton 360 Suite that allows you to protect your computer in many ways (Antivirus, Anti-spyware, Anti-phishing, Two-way Firewall, Online Identity Protection, Web Site Authentication, Automated Backup and Restore, PC Performance and Tune-ups, Embedded Support, and Protection for up to 3 PCs) Be sure to find the right software solution for your anti-virus needs if you want the extra protection and security of knowing that your software is coming from a reputable software company.

The Most Important Information: Email

When thinking of not having paper, you must think about e-mail. Some people have more e-mail addresses than that of which they have had regular places of residence. I think it's good to have an e-mail address, if not several. This is where you can communicate to friends and family. You can also sign up for news delivered to your e-mail, sports scores, horoscopes, upcoming events, receipts, and so much more. Hopefully, not too much more of the things you don't want more of. Electronic junk e-mail is also known as spam. This can be prevented in a couple of ways. One way is to have a couple e-mail addresses. One just relating to family and friends, and the other for on-line forms, and companies that you would like more information from. By keeping these separate, you won't be boggled with all of the junk while you're looking for the letter your mother sent you. And since the one e-mail address would be a separate account, you may want to make sure that this e-mail provider / e-mail program can organize the senders as to what company they're from. There are many free e-mail providers out there for you to log onto and keep your e-mail. Places like yahoo.com, gmail.com, and hotmail.com / MSN / Passport, can help you creating an on-line identity. If you use AOL instant messenger, you can get a free e-mail address as well. You may even consider purchasing your own domain name. I own kevinjfry.com, and you can e-mail me there. It only cost me the price of the domain it's self for a basic 25MB POP3 mailbox. With POP3 mail, you e-mail remains on the server until it's removed and placed somewhere else. You can download your e-mail from your POP3 account and place it on your computer in your own mail program such as Outlook or other programs that allow you to download e-mail to your computer. These programs also back up information, which can be exported, and imported. Your e-mail account, or e-mail program can keep all of your contacts listed. The thing with remotely hosted e-mail accounts like gmail and yahoo is that your address book is on-line, and you rely on these companies to keep your information safe, and only accessible by you. The bigger the company you subscribe to, may let you access other information on their servers easier. It's not just an e-mail address, but you have access to other company offers. Google offers features like credit card remembrance or shopping at their stores, access to AdWords, and things like blogger.com, which is a daughter company of google. Microsoft offers the function of Passport, which will allow you to have one username and password to access any of the Passport related sites. When I bought a laptop on-line, one of the checkout options was to make the credit card payment through Google. I signed into google from the affiliate site, placed in my credit card information, and received a discount on my order. You can have more than one e-mail address. I suggest you do get more than one, and use the features of all of them so that you can get a feel for the sites, and what they have to offer. I like G-Mail from Google the best because of how they organize your messages. You can reply to an e-mail, they respond to your e-mail, and you'll see a number next to that person. You can see the entire conversation going back and forth through the tabs above the message. These e-mail services also have the feature to search all of your saved / archived messages. If a company sends you a password that a site you haven't been to in ages, has been archived, you can search for that company name, and all of the e-mails containing that text will come up. By having an Internet e-mail account, you can access your messages from anywhere. Go to the public library, a friend's house, a cyber cafe. Log into your e-mail site, and all of your messages are right there, updated, in real time. Sometimes, depending on how you connect to the Internet, they will give you your own e-mail account. If Comcast is your high speed provider, you may get a POP3 account such as ( first.lastname@comcast.net ) if you... What you can do is have your free on-line e-mail account log into your POP3 account and view these messages right with your regular mail. e-mail sources pop, smtp, news groups

The Most Important Information: Preventative Maintenance

Something called preventative maintenance is necessary for computers to keep up and running. We use computers as if they will never fail, but both the home and office computer should be maintained to where they will last longer. Computers can get very hot from hours of usage. Some people keep their computer on all of the time making the processors hot, the memory full, and the hard drive wear. In the heated summer time, computers often fail because the circuits are too hot. Computers need to be stored and ran in a cool, dry spot. Some of the newer computers have an option to have a special cooling system that can be installed if your computer falls into this category of being in an excessive heat area. This is to prevent failure and data loss. Pet hair, dust, and smoke also contribute to computer failure. The fan in the back of the computer and around your CPU cooling fan can get clogged up with dust and pet hair. Smoke particles can get onto your hard drive creating failure. To prevent failure to dust, pet hair, and smoke particles, I would recommend you do not smoke or allow your furry friend into the room where your computer is. You may also consider an air purifier to prevent the dust from harming your PC. Your computer should also have a break from running from time to time. From installing more and more programs, you should remove the programs that you never use anymore. You can also remove or stop some of the programs running in the background. This would be to increase the speed and stability of the programs you want to run. When you are asleep, or out and about, you should let your computer rest so that it won't struggle and the microchips have a chance to cool down. This will add to the life of your computer. You may want to get some compressed air from time to time, open your computer up, and see if there is much buildup of dust, if there is take care of it and keep it clean. Start Quote From: http://www.pcguide.com/care/pm.htm Preventive Maintenance Saves Money: I'm sure we've all heard the old adage "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure". It's trite, but it is also true. Avoiding problems with your PC will save you money in the long run, compared with laying out cash for new components or repair jobs. Preventive Maintenance Saves Time: Saves time? How can taking two hours a month or whatever to perform maintenance save time? Simple: because it saves you the much bigger hassles of dealing with system failures and data loss. Most preventive maintenance procedures are quite simple compared to troubleshooting and repair procedures--now those can really eat up your time at a fantastic rate. Preventive Maintenance Helps Safeguard Your Data: For most people, the data on the hard disk is more important than the hardware that houses it. Taking steps to protect this data therefore makes sense, and that is what PM is all about. Preventive Maintenance Improves Performance: Some parts of your system will actually degrade in performance over time, and preventive maintenance will help to improve the speed of your system in these respects. End Quote accessed 2007-07-19

The Most Important Information: Internet Connections

Many years ago, all we had were phone lines with little data being able to pass through them. Now we live in the age of broadband communication, and when you're on-line in today's age, you want the speed as well as a computer that will be able to handle the speed of the information coming in to process it and show what you want on the screen. The most practical broadband connection is the cable modem offered through the Cable Company to offer some amazing speeds of Internet access. This two way, high speed connection is very practical if you're working with web sites, transferring files to other people, or wanting to take part in video conferencing, this is the ideal connection for the home, small business user. Cable Internet speeds depend on how many people are using the Internet in your area. The fewer people that are on-line, the faster your Internet connection will be. Other close alternatives to cable modem are DSL (through the phone line), and satellite service. Be careful when subscribing to these types of services in your area to be aware of the specifics of download speeds, included web space, e-mail accounts, free software, and the other thing, outgoing information. If your outgoing information is through the phone line, requests may sometimes take longer than where both modes of communication are through broadband. The basic way is to get on-line through the phone line, using a dial-up modem. One suggestion if this is the way you would like to go on-line is to get another phone line specifically for this, and to make sure there is unlimited local calling, and that your ISP (Internet service provider) is a local call. The plus side is that some of the dial-up providers are free or very low cost. The step up from broadband would be a T1 line, which allows you to have a direct connection through an Internet backbone. Through a T1 line, you can split it to have phone numbers and Internet access through this line. Additional hardware is required if you would like to have a PBX system. Firewall and proxy servers are strongly recommended to ensure proper protection from the outside intruders to your network, and your information. If you are to go to the higher broadband forms of communication, someone through your telephone company should be able to point you in the correct direction as far as your options, and the price these services and equipment will cost. But keep in mind that this is a costly option. telephone companies, cable companies, web resources Start quote from: http://10000hits.net/default.aspx?userid=1980485 [protected area: hardware basics] In fact, I recommend that you get TWO Internet connections - one cable or ADSL connection as well as a dial-up service. That way, if your fast connection ever fails for an hour … or a week… you won't have to go to the local Internet café to check your email. End Quote accessed 2007-07-18 Some would recommend a cable/dsl internet connection combined with a basic dial-up account (above).

The Most Important Information: How to Store Documents

Documents should have a uniformed way of being placed in the computer. Each scan of a document should be saved with the following information; type of document, date of document, company name / or personal note, and the page number of the scanned document. If you have the Windows 95 - Me, you can open up the 'My Documents' folder. There you can create several other folders. One may be My Scans, another being My OCRs or My Text. You can also separate these by specific file types, such as My PDFs or My JPEGs, etc. The point is to organize these once you scan these items in directly to it's specific folder and file name so that it can be easily retrieved at a later date. As well as these specific file names, you may want to even create new sub-folders in those folders with the company name or the type of document it is. For example if you were to separate by type of document you would create the folders named Bills, Receipts, Letters, Pamphlets. If you were to separate by company name you would name the companies, such as PECO, PGW, Comcast, Sprint, etc. Here is a sample file/folder directory structure: My Documents My Scans ATT PWD Letters My Documents My Scans ATT 2006-01-15 phone bill pg1.pdf 2006-01-15 phone bill pg2.pdf 2006-01-15 phone bill pg3.pdf 2006-02-15 phone bill pg1.pdf 2006-02-15 phone bill pg2.pdf PWD 2002-01-18 pwd water bill pg1.pdf 2002-01-18 pwd water bill pg2.pdf Letters 2006-02-18 Grandma pg1.pdf 2006-02-18 Grandma pg2.pdf 2006-02-19 James R re Feb. plans. PDF 2006-03-01 Equifax re credit report. PDF The two examples above are two separate ways of saving your scanned files. The first for ATT would be for the company AT&T. The reason we put the date first is for organization in the computer filing system. The year is first, month second, and the day last. This is so it's easier to locate in a list of many file names by scrolling up and down, everything will be in chronological order. The example for PWD has pretty much the same idea, but one thing added so that these files could be copied into another folder. If you named all of the files like that example, one folder could hold all of your scans. One thing to consider in organizing your scanned documents this way is that you should always consider the numbers when the computer sorts information. For example, if you get two digit numbers with your pages, they will be ordered differently. The number 10 would come before the number 2, but if you have your numbers as 01, 02, 03 … the organization would maintain. This is why we use the format for sorting dates as YYYY-MM-DD. file naming techniques Start quote from: http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/records-management/guide-for-administrators/creating/file-name Agreeing and following standards is the key to ensuring your file names are as widely understood as possible. Without standards you don't know whether 0307 is a date in March or July or a month in 2003 or 2007, or if SMT is the Senior Management Team or the School of Media & Technology. It is not possible to tell you what standards your institution should be following. However, it is possible to list the types of thing you should perhaps consider. In some cases these should define the format in which they are to be expressed (i.e. all dates should be YYYYMMDD) in others it might be a list of approved terms that can be used in each area: Dates; departments/faculties; subject areas; external bodies & agencies; job titles; personal names; buildings and other locations; types of information (e.g. minutes, agendas, project initiation documents etc). End Quote accessed 2007-07-16 the example shows that the date is very meaningful for saving information. By using this date format, documents should be easier to find in the future. Another good link to check out is the following on naming techniques for naming Internet HTML files. By utilizing the long file names associated with the newer operating systems, you can use many words and characters to name files to their meanings. http://www.netmechanic.com/news/vol6/html_no6.htm shows you that file names should have some type of commonality when using file naming techniques. I, personally, would add that your files are formed in the following format: YYYY-MM-DD – [day of week] – [company | project name] – [subject | type] – [additional info] – [page][page].ext 2007-01-24 - Kevin Fry – Diary.doc When doing this, make sure your page numbers have a leading 0. If you have up to 99 files, make sure your 1, 2, 3, etc. look like 01, 02, 03, etc. The same would be for files up to 999. Files with pages 1, 2, 3, 10, 11, 90 should look like 001, 002, 003, 010, 011, 090 respectively.