Windows

My Best Advice for Backing Up your PC or MAC With all technology and software out there, there are no excuses in not wanting or forgetting to back up our computers. Our digital life is as important as our biological life and the files stored in our devices are part of our personal history. When I visit new customers, sometimes I see that they have old pcs and they haven’t backed them up for years. I also saw people with new pcs not being backed up at all, maybe because those folks believe that a new pc has lower chances of crashing. Both attitudes are wrong. As I keep checking up regularly the backup of my customers, I believe that if I write an article about backing up computers, readers of my blog will find my resource helpful and will feel encouraged in taking a positive stance towards the files stored in their machines. – If you still own a Windows 7 pc, please back up all your files to an external USB hard drive and get a new machine as soon as possible. Windows 7 has been discontinued in 2020 and running a machine that has no patched software is risky and will make your files more vulnerable. If for some reasons you still need to run Windows 7, unplug the ethernet cable from the pc and run the machine offline. Needless to say that even an offline pc still needs to be backed up, so back it up ! – The reason why we need to backup a Windows computer is not only to protect it against data loss but also because we want to avoid ransomware. The best way to backup a pc nowadays are three: 1- By default Mac computers come with the utility called “Time Machine” which allows users to backup the entire computer to an external hard drive or to a network drive. I highly recommend to use this method but with the caveats highlighted in the point number 1 above. 2- There is also another effective way to store Mac files in the cloud and I have found easy to use Backblaze . Backblaze backs up your Mac every 15 minutes to the cloud and it has been tested to protect your files against the most common threats, including ransomware. 3- If you don’t want to invest in Backblaze and you have enough storage in your Icloud account, Icloud is also an easy and secure way to store your files in the cloud. As you can see, there are many ways to protect your files from computers that can shut down without notice. It’s up to each user to be educated and select which solution best fits budget and usability.

Effective Ransomware Protection for Small Businesses Ransomware is the worst type of malware users can ever encounter: while other types of viruses, even if they can steal your information, still allow you to operate your computer after the infection -and also potentially clean it-, ransomware locks down your machine and asks for money to restore it as it was before the infection. Ransomware leaves users with no choice: once your machine is hit by it, the only thing to do is to turn it off, because the infection can rapidly spread across other devices in your network. If you run a small business, you should have your IT Department determine if your network is hit by ransomware. Once the damage has been assessed, the business owner should never pay the ransom to have the files decrypted and restored, but he/she should take a proactive stance to avoid the incident happening again. And even if the ransom is paid, be aware that it’s not guaranteed that the files will be back as they were before. As network and computer security is always a concern of mine, every time I visit my clients, I make them aware that a simple antivirus is not enough to protect against ransomware and that small business should take the following more holistic approach to better protect their networks: If ransomware hits your network, the IT department should be authorized by the business owner to call the authorities before taking any action. After clearance from the authorities, all infected computers and servers should be formatted and operating systems should be reinstalled again from scratch. In a bulletproof network, users work together with IT people to establish not only trust but to engage in a constant flow of questions and answers where users learn more about what is dangerous and IT people can get a hold of users’ habits.

What to Do if Outlook with Gmail Workspace Is Not Working Technology can make you feel better when things seem working fine but it can turn into a nightmare if you don’t know what to do if Outlook stops retrieving the emails in your Gmail account. In my opinion, the issue with Outlook not synchronizing Gmail is an example of the commercial war between Microsoft and Google. Both companies are pushing their own products and try to avoid the integration with competing products. A few days a go I had a client who is a very basic user with a laptop: he told me that his Gmail was not working. I remoted in and saw at the bottom of his outlook that the emails of the last two days were not downloaded. He also could not send any email either. I even tried to setup a new profile and input manually the IMAP and SMTP parameters but had no luck. I have contacted his administrator who told me that the email accounts of the other users were just working fine. I then decided to further research the issue and came up with a solution that is free and very easy to implement: The Google Workspace Sync for Outlook. The tool is a tiny executable that sits idle at the bottom right of the taskbar and synchronizes emails, calendars and contacts. It retrieves the emails from your email account and delivers them to your Outlook profile. The tool does not work with regular Gmail users and if you are not an admin of your computer the software will not install, as it requires admin privileges.

How to Easily Add Online Security to your Device Every time we use a laptop or a desktop pc to go online, we still believe that it would be enough to trust the antivirus of our choice to protect us from malicious code. At a closer look, however, browsers had developed in such a way that they don’t rely anymore on the security software installed on your machine. Browsers’ security branched out from computer security as today browser companies are able to offer a wide array of plugins and customizations to enhance the safety of users’ online experience. In this post, I would like to cover my two best way to protect your browser, whether you are using Chrome, Edge or Firefox: Malware Bytes Browser Guard: this browser extension is free and very customizable: it detects ads, tracking cookies, scams and popups that can slow down or interrupt your Internet navigation. A very good feature of this product is that it even shortens google ads so that you can watch your YouTube videos almost instantly. In addition to Malware Bytes Browser Guard, I can go further into the browser settings and change the DNS settings of the Internet provider by inputting a custom set of DNS servers, such as Cloud Flare DNS, which resolves to 1.1.1.1. On Chrome go to Settings>Privacy and Security>Safe Browsing and replace the default DNS with the Public DNS service of our choice: On Edge: go to Settings >Privacy>Search>Services>Security and replace the DNS;Firefox has a slightly different approach: the browser rolled out in 2020 DNS over HTTPS by default by performing DNS queries in an encrypted HTTPS connection. Go to Settings>Network Settings and >Settings>Connection Settings, uncheck Enable DNS Over HTTPS. Protecting the Internet browser is the first shield users have against websites infected with malware and this customization should be performed not only on Windows machines but also on Mac computers. Having a safe DNS configured in the browser allows a faster and a safer search that relies on a database with clean websites that display trusted results to the user.