Emergentology
Graham Charles Walker · Emergency Medicine News · 2017
hacking: hackingFigureI'm not going to harp on this too much, but you really, really have no excuse if you lack antivirus software on your Windows computer. (Mac viruses, while they exist, are quite rare, and Macs probably have some degree of herd immunity for now.) If you don't, Avira is a free antivirus program, and Bitdefender is even better for $40 a year for three devices. Don't open email attachments unless you're expecting something from someone. Trust your instincts. If a med school acquaintance who you haven't talked to in 15 years sends you a random email called “OMG Funniest Baby Video!” it's probably best to delete it immediately. I'll also try to text that person, and tell him I think he may have been hacked. A little bit of prevention is worth a lot of cure. Back up your files. This is getting easier and easier with more cloud-based tools, but the true best way to back up your data is with several layers of redundancy. Use local backup (a hard drive plugged into your computer backing up your files); off-site backup (a hard drive plugged into your computer that backs up your files but stored somewhere else most of the time in case there's a fire at your home); or cloud backup (files backed up to an internet server hard drive). Most people do none of these three options, so buy yourself a USB hard drive (less than $100) or use a cloud-based backup system ($5 a month), and save those photos and documents that would pretty much ruin you if they were lost. A number of cheap and easy options are available. Time Machine is a free program that comes with Mac computers. You plug in an external hard drive, and the Mac will ask you if you want to use the hard drive to back up your computer, and voila — you're backing up everything. Windows comes with a few options as well. File History will back up your personal files, and it comes with Windows 8 and up. Backup and Restore and System Restore come with Windows 10, and will make an exact copy of your entire computer like Time Machine. Digital Housekeeping Cloud-based backups will run you about $5 per month. Backblaze, CrashPlan, and Carbonite will give you unlimited storage, and provide you with a program that runs in the background, updating your online backup every so often. I would be remiss not to mention some of my favorite, most user-friendly, cloud-based file transferring-synchronizing programs — Dropbox and Google Drive. These give you some additional benefits if you have multiple computers. They will automatically save the exact same file that you saved on one computer to another computer. You can now edit many of these documents you save online. Most people are probably familiar with Google Docs, which will also save these files to your Google Drive. These services also offer versioning, one of their coolest (and least-used) features. These services aren't just saving a file as you're writing a paper, editing a photo, or making a spreadsheet, they're saving every single version of the file you made. If you wrote a three-page letter, edited it down to one page, but want to add back in some of the other paragraphs later, you can go back and look at the version of the letter you wrote that was three pages long, copy the text you want, and insert it into your current one-page letter. Pretty cool, huh? It's like a cloud-based undo button. That said, I don't really like to consider these true “backup” programs because they don't back up everything on your computer, only the things you select. If you don't save that tax document to the correct location, it won't be backed up and saved for you with these programs. A true backup program should be effortless, making it really difficult for you to lose your data. Want to learn more about these topics? A great number of websites and tutorials are out there to help make your online crusading even more secure. Remember, online security is often a numbers game, just like bike theft or car break-ins. Would-be thieves and hackers will move to easier targets if you make yourself just a little less enticing.