As everyone knows, last year ended with Sandy ripping the East Coast to shreds. I have no doubt that Sandy’s destructive power reinforced the notion of how vulnerable we are in the Aloha State.
With the new year fresh, it’s a good time to think about protecting your data. You’ll want to start with a security suite, which means firewall protection, anti-virus and anti-spam. Trend Micro, a product I’ve used for a number of years, is as comprehensive a system as you can ask for. In addition to the usual malware protection, you get spam and phishing filters as well as tests for Facebook privacy, parental controls and a system tuneup, which helps recover wasted space on your drive and shortens start-up time.
Installing the program was easy, and Trend Micro provided an added app that most people don’t even consider — protection for your smartphone —which I promptly installed on my Android.
You can pick up the package at Best Buy or Amazon for less than $50.
As Hurricane Sandy illustrated, backing up your data "locally" is not enough. Old-fashioned, full-system backups to external drives are still important, but a better way is to store your documents in the cloud. If you have upgraded to Microsoft Office 2010, Windows 8 or Mac OSX Mountain Lion, you already have iCloud from Apple or SkyDrive from Microsoft.
What this really means is that you can store all of your files (or just your important ones) in multiple copies in the cloud. "Multiple redundancy" (a fancy IT term for keeping lots of copies) is clearly the best way to go.
Both iCloud and SkyDrive offer free accounts with 5 GB of storage, and more is available for an annual rate. You do need to be careful using these, or any cloud storage, for backup, as it can get expensive. This is particularly true if you are doing a full backup of a documents folder or its equivalent.
Both iCloud and SkyDrive can be used to sync a list of files or folders automatically and can be used with backup applications.
If you are using something other than Windows 7/8 Backup or IOS, don’t feel abandoned — there are other cloud storage options. Google Drive (previously known as Google Docs) has evolved into cloud storage from Google. You can now download a client that acts as a desktop drive link to store files and can be used as a backup system depending on the backup client you use. On the commercial cloud storage front, two of the most popular cloud storage services, Dropbox (www.dropbox.com) and Box (www.box.com), are also usable as file-sharing services.
Box and Dropbox have been moving into more powerful cloud storage tools from their file-sharing origins.
Both provide desktop clients but are basically Web interfaces. In most respects they are similar to iCloud, SkyDrive and Google Drive. With a little tweaking, all of these can provide working, synced copies of all of your documents and can become, for a monthly fee, your primary storage with complete redundancy — basically eliminating the need for traditional backup.
If you disregard every other New Year’s resolution, at least be certain that your anti-virus software and your backup system are up to date. I promise this will save you sleep in 2013.
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Mike Meyer, former Internet general manager at Oceanic Time Warner Cable, now runs Islanda Managed Cloud Services, based in Honolulu. Reach him at mike.meyer@islandatech.com.
