December 30, 2010, 9:30 am - I was on the phone with my accountant, David McClure, discussing end of the year tax records and new equipment purchases for 2011, when I mentioned that my Dell laptop, almost four years old, was showing signs of fatigue.
She overheard me.
20 minutes later - catastrophic hard drive failure. I've since removed the drive from my laptop and bought an enclosure, but I don't yet know if any data can be recovered.
Today, before you renew your gym membership or start buying organic/local foods - take the time to back up your hard drive AND change your account passwords.
For small business owners who are doing their own IT work - it's easy to let the weekly backups slip to the bottom of the 'to do' pile. But especially if you are using Outlook - key documents and emails may disappear at the drop of a hat. (Remember - look for that *.pst file - which is the heart of where Outlook stores your emails and attachments)
Massive storage has never been cheaper. Ads in today's paper are running specials on one terabyte (TB -1000 gigabytes) drives for $70. As a part of my unexpected computer upgrade over the last 48 hours, I picked up a 2 TB external hard drive on Amazon for $99. TigerDirect is a great website for screaming deals on external drives and other computer accessories. If you aren't into clicking and dragging and want an easy backup process - Clickfree offers some great products for easy backup.
While I was upgrading my system this weekend to a new MacBook Pro (aside: the key Microsoft Office suite programs are available for $120 for a Mac) - I was reminded during checkout that my credit had been compromised last year (I had to answer a myriad of questions from the bank to confirm my identity).
I think it's also worthwhile to take a few minutes to log into your bank, email, insurance and credit accounts and update your passwords. Compromise could occur through a phishing scam - but even if you think that could never happen, that you're safe from key loggers, white vans with antennas outside your home monitoring encrypted signals, etc, it just takes a minute - and I think better safe than sorry.
For any questions regarding criminal charges, a law enforcement investigation, grand jury subpoena, federal indictment, computer crimes, white collar criminal (fraud) charges, or any Mecklenburg County state charges, contact the Winiker Law Firm at (704) 750-9212 or info@winikerlaw.com
