by Gina Trapani

When was the last time you backed up the important files on your computer? Last year when your best friend called in tears after the Blue Screen of Death ate her thesis?

Yeah, I thought so.

Hard drives fail. It's a fact of computing life. It's not a matter of whether or not your computer's disk will fry, it's a matter of when. The question is how much it will disrupt your life.

Don't expect yourself to remember to back up your data, or stack your closet full of burned CD's or DVD's. Today we're going to set up automated nightly, weekly, monthly local and off-site backups for your PC using free software. Once you get this up and running, you'll never have to worry about losing data again.

What you'll need:

1. A Windows PC. (Sorry Mac folks, you're another article.)
2. An external hard drive.
   I've had great luck with a LaCie FireWire drive, which of course, requires your computer has a FireWire port. When choosing size, go for 4-5 times the amount of data you want to back up (i.e., 4 times the size of your My Documents folder.)
3. An FTP server.
   This is optional, but if you want off-site backup, it's a must. See previous post, Ask Lifehacker Readers: Web hosting provider?, for recommendations on companies that provide not only web hosting, but FTP-able disk space.

Here's how to get your backups up and running.

1. Set up your hardware and software. Download and install the most excellent free software, SyncBack Freeware v3.2.9. SyncBackSE version 4.0 is also available to buy at $25. This tutorial will use v.3 for the cheapies and those of you giving SyncBack a try for the first time. Once your external drive is connected to your computer and turned on, name it "Backup" and browse to it in Explorer. (On my computer, it's the F:/ drive.) Create 3 folders named "Nightly," "Weekly" and "Monthly" We're going to store our backups into these folders.
   
   
2. Create the backup profile. Fire up SyncBack. Create a new profile called "Nightly Local Backup." Set the source folder to your documents folder, and the destination to your backup drive's "Nightly" folder, like this:
   
   
3. Select the directories to backup. You can backup the entire "My Documents" folder, but I didn't want to do that, because I've got about 75 gigabytes of music, photos and video that don't change too much and aren't world-ending in subdirectories of "My Documents." I don't have the space on my drive to keep copies of multi-gigabyte media in triplicate. So I chose the backup "selected subdirectories" option, which lets me tell SyncBack to ignore "My Music," "My Pictures," and "My Video" each night when it runs. To do so, click on the "Subdirectories" tab. If you've got tons of subdirectories, it'll take SyncBack sometime to traverse the tree and show 'em to you. Go grab a drink of water and come back to check off the directories you want backed up each night.
4. Set up e-mail notification of backup failure. Since we're a bunch of smart cookies, enable the advanced options in SyncBack by hitting the "Expert" button at the bottom. To keep tabs on whether or not your nightly backup is completing successfully, in the E-mail tab, check off "E-mail the log file when the profile is done." I don't want an e-mail every day; I just want one if things go awry. So also check off "Only e-mail the log if an error occurs." Set your SMTP server options as well and hit the "Test E-mail Settings" button to make sure you can receive messages. Click to enlarge image.
   
   
5. Schedule the job. Now hit up the "Misc" tab, and hit the Schedule button. Here you'll tell Windows to run this Nightly backup profile, well, nightly. I set mine to run at 2:00AM every night. Be sure to set your Windows password for this scheduled task by hitting the "Set Password" button.

Wash, rinse and repeat twice for Weekly Local Backup and Monthly Local Backup profiles, but point them at the appropriate directories and also set the schedule to, um, weekly and monthly, respectively. Once you're all set up, you can run each job as a test (it'll take a long time, depending on how much data you've got), or just leave things to run on their own. Once all 3 profiles have run, you'll have 3 copies of your most important data on your external drive getting updated every night, week and month. If something goes wrong and the backups fail, you get an email notification letting you know.

This means if your hard drive fries? The most data you'll lose is a day's worth. If you overwrote an important file? Recover last week's or last month's copy.

UPDATE: Reader Patrick points out that if you make bad changes the last day of the week AND month, those changes will replicate to your backups and you can lose data. One way to avoid that is to schedule bi-monthly (every other month) backup as well. Thanks, Patrick!

Now, our backup plan doesn't stop there. If your computer's hard drive buys the farm, you're covered, but what if your house burns down or gets burglarized? You want your most important data somewhere OFF site as well. This is where your FTP server comes in. Create a last SyncBack profile called "Nightly Remote Backup" that sends all your important data over the wire from, say, your hard drive in New York to your FTP server in Atlanta. If you don't like the idea of your data on someone else's server, check out the compression tab: you can have your files zipped up and passworded before they get FTP'ed for a little extra security.

Update: An astute reader points out that compression is not enabled for FTP backup. So, create a profile that compresses and passwords your files and set it to run BEFORE your FTP profile which transfers the zips. Thanks, Ralph!

That's it! Once your automated backup system is up and running you can rest easy knowing that if Something Bad happens, chances are your data will be safe.

Backup geeks and the curious should be sure to paw through all of SyncBack's tabs and options, there's tons of them. For example, in the "Autoclose" tab, set SyncBack to shut down any programs with a word you specify in the title bar before it runs a backup job. The "Programs" tab lets you set commands to run before and after backup happens - handy for database or source repository dumps, exporting your Instiki wiki to HTML and anything else you want to move or mash before you back up.

There are a million and one programs and ways to backup your hard drive, and this is just one of them. How do you ensure your data's security and redundancy? Do tell in the comments or at tips at lifehacker.com.

Gina Trapani, the editor of Lifehacker, wishes the world automated, worry-free, continually-running backups. Her semi-weekly feature, Geek to Live, appears every Wednesday and Friday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Geek to Live feed to get new installments in your newsreader.

Politics : Security RSS
New Apple Trojan Means Mac Hunting Season Is Open
By Ryan Singel Email 11.01.07 | 8:30 PM
A Trojan that targets Mac users visiting a porn site pretends to be video-decoding software, but instead installs rogue code.
Screenshot: Courtesy of Sunbelt Software

The Mac has officially gone mainstream.

The proof? On Halloween, professional online criminals were found using Trojan-horse software to target, for the first time, computers running Apple's OS X operating system -- just as they have been doing for years on the more ubiquitous flavors of Windows.

"Apple's day has finally come, and Apple users are going to get hit hard," security researcher Gadi Evron said. "OS X is the new Windows 98."

The Trojan comes disguised as a video-decoding plug-in that users are told they must install to watch free porn clips. Instead, the software burrows into the operating system and diverts some of the victim's future web surfing to sites under the attacker's control. It's the professional attack on Macs that the security community has long predicted, according to Dave Marcus, security research manager at McAfee's Avert Lab, who said it was "written by people who know how to write malware."

The arrival of the Mac Trojan signals that cybercrooks have decided there are finally enough Apple systems on the internet to make attacking them profitable, according to security experts. Apple is the nation's No. 3 desktop and laptop seller in the United States, behind Dell and Hewlett Packard. And this year, the Cupertino company accounted for an impressive 8.1 percent of the personal-computer market for the third quarter, up nearly two percentage points from the same period a year ago. Evron and other observers predict that black hats will have a field day with Macs, as well as with Apple's new mobile platforms.

"With 2 million iPhones and iPod Touches, it makes sense they will think of them as an evolving market to exploit, and there are a lot of new Mac users who aren't as savvy as Mac's earlier users," said CEO Alex Eckelberry of Sunbelt Software, which sells security software for Windows machines.

But Carl Howe, an Apple analyst at Blackfriars Communications, disputes the security researchers' theories. He thinks that OS X's Linux heritage makes Apple systems less vulnerable to attack than Windows-based platforms. He argues that even if hacking Macs hasn't been profitable in the past, attackers would have done it anyway if they'd been able -- just for the attention.

"I think the market-share thing has always been a myth," Howe said. "It's a good story to talk about."

Announced Wednesday by Mac-focused security company Intego, the Mac Trojan was found on a set of pornography sites, where attackers dangled free movies that supposedly required users to install a special Quicktime codec to view.

The codec, however, is fake. Instead of unlocking a skin flick, it installs what Intego dubbed the OSX.RSPlug.A Trojan horse on the user's computer.

Black-hat hackers have been using fake codecs for more than a year to trick Windows users into installing software. In this case, when the site serving the malware determines that a user is on a Mac, it delivers a Mac-specific version.

Once installed, the Trojan hijacks the system's domain-name service. Internet-connected applications use DNS to translate the domain part of an URL, such as www.Wired.com, into the numeric IP address of a server. By hijacking the DNS, the attacker is able to replace search results with links to sites that he controls, in hopes of making money from online purchases, according to Eckelberry.

The software could also intercept intended visits to sites such as banks, eBay and PayPal and redirect them to fake websites that harvest users' logins and passwords. The scammers could then use that info to to get money out of the real sites, but neither Sunbelt nor McAfee researchers have seen the malware harvesting personal-finance info.

Unlike many Windows-based attacks, the Trojan doesn't exploit a hole in Apple's software, and it can't install itself. Instead, it relies on social engineering, tricking users into downloading the codec, and requiring that they type in the administrator password to install it.

But the fact that the hackers aren't attacking through software bugs doesn't change the portent of this week's attack, according to Eckelberry. "I don't care if you have to type in your admin password," Eckelberry said. "If you are asked to install a QuickTime plug-in, you will."

For the past year, fake codecs have been among the top problems encountered by Windows users, according to Eckelberry. The attacks have gotten so professional-looking that the fake codecs even have fake, annoying end-license-user agreements that users have to agree to.

The Mac Trojan is created by the same malware crew that has been infecting Windows machines with the Trojans known as Zlob and DNSChanger, according to Eckelberry and Marcus.

Marcus said McAfee researchers have already found the Mac Trojan on 65 websites. But he said the malware is not living up to its full potential: It only redirects users who attempt to visit one obscure adult website.

"Truthfully, this is kind of strange," said Marcus. "If you are going to mess with someone's DNS, I would have done far more fake DNS entries. I have a sneaking suspicion is that word got out before they wanted it to, but that's just an educated guess."

Evron sees more problems for Apple users than just new Trojans that try to trick users. Hackers will find it profitable and all too easy to find holes in Apple software, because the company hasn't paid sufficient attention to security, said Evron.

He predicts Apple will experience a full-range of attacks, just as Microsoft did a decade ago when Windows machines and the internet first met.

"It's Mac season. The next two years will be interesting."

---

Staff writer David Kravets contrib

Is it Time to Retire That Old System?
By Ryan Hutzel

Many times, I get the question: "Do I need a new computer, mine is only six years old?" In my mind I think, wow, six years! This is becoming a common place with people that have grown up with computers. We remember the old days of the 100mhz machines and how much faster 233mhz was. Now everything is getting washed together with newer specifications, bells, and whistles.

In the past year, I have taken three manufactured computers and upgraded the hard drive and memory in the each of the units. The owners were absolutely delighted that the computer seemed to be new and running faster. This is a strange phenomenon, because the CPU in the computer was not any faster, however the data access to the hard drive and the ability to access the data from ram had increased. This creates a smoother ride for the user's experience versus what they remembered when they first purchased the computer.

The moral to this article in brief is to consider a few things when the thought a of a new computer crosses your mind. To start with let's consider age and speed. Five years ago (2002) 1ghz or higher was common. Today, even the newest version of Microsoft Office (2007) only requires 500mhz and 256mb of ram. This was very common five years ago. So, the next question to think about is, "What do I use my computer for?" If you use your computer only for the following things, you may be able to breath some life into that old machine without investing in a brand new one.

• E-mail
• Internet Surfing
• Word Processing
• Basic Gaming (Flash based, 2d)

If you computer is mainly used for the above, then a new hard drive and ram upgrade would be ideal for your situation. You may get another two years out of your system, maybe more. Consulting your local computer repair shop can help assist you in this process.

Ryan Hutzel is the owner of Ryan's Computer Consulting Services based in Greencastle, PA. More information can be found http://hard-drives.ryansccs.com for data recovery help and how-to's.

Please visit http://www.ryansccs.com for additional computer information and services.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Ryan_Hutzel
http://EzineArticles.com/?Is-it-Time-to-Retire-That-Old-System?&id=806395

Mac OS X or Windows? Nothing gets a flame war going faster than that old debate. But these days, many people are using both of those operating systems on a network. Maybe you have a Windows PC in the home office, but you've got an iMac for video editing and a Mac Mini for serving digital media in your living room. One big happy family? Hardly ‑‑ Macs and Windows PCs can't see each other on a network right out of the box, preventing you from sharing documents, photos, videos, music and even printers among your flock of computers.
Luckily, the ability to share files among all of your computers on your home network is well within reach. You just need to tweak a few settings before all of your computers are happily sharing.
To share files between a Windows PC and a Mac OS X machine, you need to enable File Sharing on both and create some common folders accessible to both computers. Note that we are assuming an environment of trusted users such as a secure home network behind a router firewall. These techniques will work over a Wi‑fi connection, a wired Ethernet or any combination of the two.
Also, even though we'll concentrate on Windows XP here, your steps should be largely the same if you're using Vista.
Setting Up the Mac (Tiger and Panther)
1. Open the System Preferences application and click the Sharing icon.
2. Select the Services tab and check Windows Sharing. If you're using Mac OS X's built in firewall, you may need to adjust your firewall settings as well to allow other computers in. To access the firewall, select the Firewall tab in the Sharing pane.
3. Write down your Mac's IP address, as you'll need to enter this later when you connect from the PC.
Setting Up the Windows PC (XP)
1. Right‑click on the folder you want the Mac to be able to access and choose Properties.
2. Click on the Sharing tab and select to option that reads: "Share this folder on the network."
3. If you want to give visiting users read and write access to that folder, check the option to "Allow network users to change my files."
4. Click Apply and then OK. That's it!
Accessing the PC From the Mac
In the Mac OS X Finder, click the Go menu and choose "Network." This will open a new Finder window with a list a visible machines. Select the folder you created earlier on the Windows machine. You should be able to access those files as if they were on your Mac.
For a slightly more sophisticated approach, you could choose the "Connect To Server" option in the Finder's Go menu and then enter the PC's network address.

Once the Mac connects, choose the shared folder from the list and hit OK. This should mount the folder on your Mac desktop for convenient access.
Accessing the Mac From the PC
Open your Windows Start menu and click Search. Select the "Computers or people" option, then choose "A computer on the network."

Now enter the Mac's IP address (which you wrote down earlier) in the search field. You should then be prompted for your Mac's username and password.
Once you've entered the username and password, you should see the home folder on your Mac and you should now be able to browse, edit, create and delete files just as you would on your Mac.