Plan for the unexpected

[warwagon]

I’m self-employed and have been operating my own computer repair business for the past 9 years. I run Malwarebytes Pro on all 5 computers in my house. For some reason I was not affected by the false positive on any of those my machines, although I did have 1 customer that was affected.

It was very unfortunate that this happened. Everyone, please use this catastrophe as a reminder that, things you can’t control will happen. Hard drives die without warning and other unforeseen things can bring your systems to it's knees. So please remember to keep yourself backed up.

There are 4 things I would recommend everyone do.

1. Keep a current backup of your files
   
2. Keep a current drive image of your boot drive on a hard drive that is not connected to the machine. This will give you the option to restore it if your boot drive becomes unbootable, or in this case it would allow you to restore system files from it. Keeping it disconnected from the machine means a false positive can’t accidently delete the drive image from the drive.
   
3. Keep off site backups / or at a bare minimum keep a copy of your data out side your computer. This way if this sort of thing ever happens again, you will have a copy of your important data outside your machine that an application cannot accidently delete.
   
4. If uptime is important to you, buy another hard drive and clone your boot drive on to it.
   

Just this week (The day before the false positive), I ordered 4 250GB 2.5 inch 7200rpm Sata hard drives. Each hard drive will contain a clone of a systems boot drive.

In the event something like this does hit which makes my system unbootable, I will simply be able to put the coinciding clone into the machine and be back on my feet.

Remember to plan for the unexpected. Back up your data not for the reasons you can think of but for the ones you can’t.

[mountaintree16]

Excellent advice! Thank you for sharing.

[LDTate]

Excellent advice! Thank you for sharing.

Great job

[Firefox]

Couldn't have said it better myself....

[Hardhead]

I have several clients that were lucky that they didn't have any problems. Great advice! I use True image which will do everything you have described. It also backs up the MBR.

[exile360]

I have several clients that were lucky that they didn't have any problems. Great advice! I use True image which will do everything you have described. It also backs up the MBR.

I use Macrium Reflect Free to do the same. It's quite handy, particularly since I've partitioned my drive so that the OS/programs are on the primary partition and the other is used for storage, meaning if my OS gets hosed, all I need do is either restore that partition+the MBR to be back in business without losing any data or even reformat the primary partition if I wish, again, without losing any of my data. Most of the software I use is portable too, and I run those particular programs from the secondary partition so they retain all their data and settings even if the OS itself goes down.

[Firefox]

I use two solutions depending on what computer I am using....

We use Symantec Ghost Corp Edition and ShadowProtect both work great, I actually used ShadowProtect to recover one of the computers I was having issues with....