What's the Best Internet Security Plan? Follow me for the top secret answer...

UPDATE:

Wow, talk about the best Internet security plan. While I was writing this, a friend called to tell me that his laptop drive crashed! He wasn't upset because he had an entire image on an external drive. It wasn't long before he got it all back to normal.

See, I wasn't kidding!

UPDATE: I took a short trip to California to see the family around Christmas this year. As soon as I arrived I found that my parents' computers had spyware and Trojans infecting them.

My dad has a tough time using a computer at all since he's 76 years old and so he doesn't know what he's downloading many times. Mom does much better but the grand kids have their games and some of those harbor nasty stuff hidden inside.

I took care of the mess, updated the Webroot antivirus/antispyware, ran a second spyware program called SuperAntiSpyware (the free version) and found more stuff. This goes to show you that none of them get it all. You need the best Internet security plan you can get.

No sooner than I had finished, my brother came by and said he needed help. His daughter had downloaded a virus and it crippled the computer badly. So, he restored it from the restore partition and needed me to get it connected to the router again. But, in the restore process he lost everything--family pictures, passwords, settings, all of it.

So...we talked about a backup solution so that he could avoid this in the future. The best Internet security plan includes a backup plan.

So, how did that happen? Simple. He didn't have ANY up-to-date antivirus/antispyware software running AT ALL! Now, he's an intelligent man but he just didn't realize how important it was. And that's SO COMMON! People just don't know that they need this stuff.

I know it's hard to believe but the same week I went to my wife's parents' house down the road to install a webcam on their computer. When I got there I found the same thing: viruses, Trojans, spyware, etc. Unbelievable.

I set up encryption on their wireless signal from the router and when I mentioned it they said they didn't even know they had wireless! A wireless signal floating around the neighborhood for anyone to use and they weren't even aware of it.

I did the whole enchilada for them too. So in a one week visit I spent about 12 hours doing computer related stuff for the family. None of them knew how to do any of it for the most part. Do you?

UPDATE: Yesterday I was at my local restaurant working on this page. I did some copy and pasting and somehow copied the wrong page text into this one! Actually, it was my home page text. Since I keep a second hard drive attached (to back up my documents) when working outside my home office, the wrong text got updated on the backup drive. Oh no! What now?

Aha! I have everything in four places: my laptop main drive, my main backup drive at home, my portable backup drive, and my online backup. I simply went home, temporarily disabled the SyncToy program that echoes my documents to the backup drives, and restored the file from the home office backup drive.

That's why I keep multiple copies of everything important. You never know when you'll make a mistake and lose hours of work. Not me, I want the best Internet security system I can get. That includes a backup system.