Why back up your computer to protect it? Well, if hackers or scammers manage to get onto your desktop, they could encrypt important documents and keep you from accessing them. That might mean any places you store passwords will no longer be accessible, making changing them more complicated if you don’t have them stored elsewhere. If files are deleted in a hack or scam, backing them up will ensure you have another copy and keep important information from being lost. Protecting yourself and your devices against scams is important, and IDrive is here to help. Check out all the ways you can keep your computer from getting hacked below, and see how IDrive can help you with all of them. Then keep scammers away from your data by getting IDrive now.
Back up your computer, and back up your backups
IDrive is a cloud storage service, giving you a place to back up your documents and pictures online, as well as on your hard drive. With the storage being online, you can automatically back up multiple devices on one account, sending things to the cloud without you having to do anything, and even syncing documents between these devices without a second thought. However, it’s also important to perform manual backups of your data every so often. Automatic backups can fail, or worse, could be accessed in a hack since devices would be connected to where these automatic backups go. But with manual backups, that possible hacking is cut off. With IDrive, you can set the program to automatically back things up to the cloud and set that data to be encrypted, making things more difficult for hackers to access. And no data is deleted from your IDrive unless you manually delete it or run an archive cleanup to match your computer data to your account. There’s also an alert system you can set up to let you know when automatic backups fail, again protecting your data. But you can also initiate manual backups whenever you want that save to different parts of the cloud or that connect to external hard drives, preserving your data in a few places. This helps keep your computer safe in the long run and gives you plenty of data to access, even on a new device in case a hack or a malfunction puts your desktop out of commission. So backing up your devices is important, and IDrive lets you do just that — and it lets you back up your backups, preserving your data in innumerable ways.
Be careful where and what you click — and have a plan if you don’t
Another big way you can protect your computer is just being cautious of what you click on. As IDrive points out on its blog, phishing scams work by drawing you in to click on links that let hackers into your system. This can be devastating for your computer, and then for you when your data is accessed and possibly held for ransom. It’s good to identify phishing scams, look for typos in the emails and subject lines and requests for usernames and passwords. As a general rule, don’t click links from email addresses you don’t know and that don’t provide any passwords on form pages that have URLs you can’t recognize or that are misspelled. If your caution isn’t enough, and you accidentally click a link that lets a scammer into your system, IDrive has your back. The Events feature logs when your account was logged into, and logged out of, as well as when files and folders were uploaded, downloaded, or shared all with helpful date and time stamps, and IP addresses of where these activities took place. This can help you confirm whether or not a hack took place, and therefore let you take action if something has happened. The help doesn’t stop there. IDrive’s Snapshots system also helps you out by letting you input in a time before a hack occurred and restoring your data and files to what they looked like at that time. This means if someone gets into your computer, encrypts your documents, and tries to get you to pay them to get your access back, IDrive can let you restore your documents too before the encryption and let you keep your money. So be careful what you click first, but in case something happens, IDrive can be your fallback plan, keeping you and your data just that much safer.
Keep your computer, and your data, physically safe
When thinking about vulnerable places on your computer, it’s good to worry about hacks into your digital files and data, that’s most hacker’s targets, but your computer’s hardware can also be at risk. If you have a built-in camera on your computer, for example, or a general webcam, a hacker could access them without your knowledge and film you doing something compromising. The hacker could then try to get money out of you by threatening to expose the video (sensing a pattern of ransoming, here? It’s a common hacker tactic), so it’s good to prevent that sort of threat before it’s possible. Cover your computer camera or webcam with dark tape or a colored piece of paper to keep it from being usable if it’s accessed. While you protect your computer’s physical hardware that way, also protect your data physically with IDrive Express. With IDrive Express, which costs a bit more than a typical account, you get sent actual external hard drives to your home, and you put your data and files on them through the IDrive application. IDrive can back up your entire operating system and hard drive, so you have a lot of data you can protect. Once your data is on the hard drives via a USB transfer, the data is encrypted, along with the file paths, and you have an option to have a private key that essentially password-protects everything on the drive. From there, you send the external hard drives back to IDrive in the mail, and IDrive puts your data on its primary storage system as a backup for as long as you have an IDrive account. If anything happens to your computer or devices later, and you need all that data from the external hard drives, IDrive sends you external hard drives again with the backups from its storage system, letting you physically have your data delivered and then restored in case cloud access on your device is compromised. It’s an extra expense, but like with taping over your computer camera, it also gives you peace of mind that there is just some information and files hackers won’t be able to physically access, even if they get digital access. That extra bit of protection keeps you extra safe.
Get IDrive today
As you can see, IDrive helps protect you from scammers and hackers in some major ways while also being a great data storage system for your computer and other devices. Keep scammers away from your data and get IDrive today. And save 50% on your first year when you use promo code Kim at checkout! Your computer and your data will be safer once you do.
