I have talked about this many times before, but this is very important, and spring is coming so I thought I would mention it again. All surge protectors are power strips, but not all power strips are surge protectors. (Too long, don’t want to read it? Here is a video that says the same thing.)
Lightning can strike anywhere, if it strikes near your home all of your electronics plugged in are in danger of getting hit by massive amounts of electricity that can quickly destroy them. To solve this problem, you could always unplug every electronic in your home as soon as you stop using them, but this is not very practical and what would happen if you were using them during a lightning storm? Which you should not do.
The solution is to protect them even when they are plugged in. Never plug any electronic device directly into a wall socket. Always use a surge protector. Make sure it is a surge protector and not just a power strip. It should say surge protector on it. If it doesn’t, you should replace it with a surge protector. Surge protectors have a break point, kind of like a fuse in them that will break due to too much electricity running through them. They will break so the devices plugged into them don’t receive too much electricity.
When shopping for a surge protector, look carefully at the packaging. Many surge protectors come with warranty coverage that might cover a certain amount if they fail to suppress the surge, and it damages your devices. Always read fine print because these warranties might only apply for a certain time period.
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Yes, this is actually a thing. I guess there is a day for everything anymore. March 31st is National Backup Your Computer Day, so I decided to give some insight into what is a backup and what isn’t. Many people use OneDrive, Google Drive, iCloud, and Dropbox and think they have a backup. In one sense this will help you recover your files if your computer dies or is stolen, but it isn’t a true backup. It is a sync.
With sync, the cloud service keeps an exact copy of your documents and each time you make a change on your device it will change in the cloud. For the most part, this is great except for a couple instances:
If you have the sync turned on and you delete your computer copy, it will also delete your cloud copy. Years ago, I had a customer that used Dropbox to share documents with employees and she figured this was also a great way to back it up. One day she had to fire an employee that had access to Dropbox, so she got the employee’s computer and proceeded to delete the drop box from it. This also deleted all files stored in the cloud version of her Dropbox. Luckily, she figured it out fairly quickly and Dropbox was able to help her restore the files. If she had signed out of the drop box on the employee’s computer first, this would not have happened. Before doing anything you are not sure about, please call me!
If you get ransomware and it encrypts your files, it will also encrypt your cloud copy when you are connected to it. With a true backup each time there is a change to a file it saves it in addition to the old copy of the file. This can be helpful in catastrophic ransomware issues or if you simply overwrite a file. I got a call one day because a customer could not open any files on his computer. Upon further discussion I learned that when he tried to open a file, he would get a pop up telling him how to purchase the “key” to fix this situation. It would only cost about $800 to purchase the key. He had opened an attachment in an email that looked like it came from FedEx, and it had encrypted his entire computer. Since he was connected to their server, I told him to immediately disconnect from the internet and also to disconnect the server from the internet. When I got to his office, I first checked the server, and the virus had already infected about 20% of the files on the server. Luckily, this company had a true backup, and I was able to recover all of the infected files. If they were using one of the sync clouds, they would not have been able to recover their files.
When you have a true back up, the process is different. It is a one-way process, not a sync. It also keeps previous versions. It is like putting all of your files in a box and sealing it up and then putting it on a shelf. Then you make a few changes and those get put in another box and also get put on the shelf. The boxes don’t care if you delete a file or change a file. The previous boxes are unaffected, but the changes will be in a new box on the shelf. Later on, if there is an issue with a file or many files you can go to the previous box and retrieve the files.
There are also a few kinds of backups. Most work like the cloud services where they charge a certain amount of money for a certain amount of backup storage. If you go over the limit, you have to pay more. The one I recommend is a little different. They charge by computer a fixed dollar amount regardless of how much you are backing up. I had a customer with two external drives connected to her computer. They were each 4 TB, and my backup didn’t care as long as it was attached to this computer.
Here is a link to a video I made about this.
If you want more information about this backup solution, you can call me or just use this link to get it for yourself.
I know I have talked a lot about passwords in the past, but I just had an incident with a new customer that really drives the point home on making sure you know what accounts you have and how to get into them. Not knowing what accounts you have could be devastating to your business.
Let me start at the beginning. A friend recommended that someone call me when they could not get their email working. No problem usually. I get a lot of calls like this. The difference this time was that his computer had also quit working, and his hard drive was encrypted so I could not even get to his information. This was going to take some detective work.
The first thing I did was replace his hard drive to get his computer working again. We saved the old drive in case we could at some point get into his Microsoft account to get the encryption key to access this drive. He wasn’t sure if he had a Microsoft account. He had always had people help him with his technology and he didn’t pay attention to the information. He wasn’t even sure who helped him with his email and accounts involving this type of stuff.
Once we had his computer running again, we attempted to login to any accounts using the email addresses he knew about. He did have his phone, so we hoped to be able to authenticate these accounts using his phone. We found two personal Gmail accounts and we thought we were well on our way.
Using the Gmail accounts we attempted to log into his business email account. We were unsuccessful at this. We finally figured out that he had set up his domain at GoDaddy, so we reached out to them and using his phone number we were able to get into his account, but it did not have any email accounts listed, just the domain. I will also mention this took us a few days for GoDaddy to give us access to this account.
At this point we tried to just set up his email using GoDaddy, but they informed us that he already had email set up with Microsoft and we needed to contact them to either use the one set up there or have them release our domain so we could set up his email at GoDaddy. We elevated the support, but they kept saying they could not do anything, and we needed to contact Microsoft.
With the help of GoDaddy, we finally found a phone number for Microsoft and actually talked to a person. They helped us set up a ticket for the Microsoft system and we thought we were finally moving forward. They told us this will take a few more days and they would email or call us. This actually took more than a week and when we finally heard from them, they told us they could only help us if we were the global administrator on the account. I gave them every email address he could remember but they said none of those were the global admin.
It turns out the global admin was someone from a company that helped him set this up years ago and he was not sure of the company name. He is currently going through old receipts trying to find this company that he isn’t sure of the name. This has gone on for more than a month and his business is suffering due to this. In addition, I have spent many hours working on this, so he is also racking up a bill with me.
Why am I telling you this? This is a worst-case scenario of not having all of the information for your accounts. If someone sets up your domain, email and website make sure you know how to access all of these accounts. Hopefully your relationship with the company that sets everything up will stay intact but sometimes companies close down, and people move away. It is also helpful to know what email account is connected to your Office365 account.
These are probably the most popular accounts, but this goes for any software on your computer. If you don’t know how to access your accounts, you can end up losing a lot when disaster strikes. If you are not sure about your accounts, I can help you get control over them. It is much easier when you have a working connection to those accounts. If you wait until your computer crashes this becomes much more difficult.
The person listed above thinks this might cause him to shut down his business. I don’t want this to happen to anybody. If you have accounts out there and you are not sure how to access them, let me know and I can help. It is best to attempt this before your computer breaks or your previous vendors disappear.
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