Keeping myself and my data secure online is a topic that I never tire of talking about. If I could take a class about information security for free, I would commit to learning all I could stand about information security. Until you get your computer hacked into, your credit card fraudulently used, you still won’t fully understand the urgence about this matter. Thankfully, neither of those scenarios has been my portion, but I’m exceedingly careful about my habits online. For starters, McAfee released a pdf document about top search terms that led to malware infections. Guess what those top keywords were? Searches for lyrics keywords and search phrases that include the word, “free”. Now, since getting my first laptop in August 2008, I haven’t sustained a single successful infection of my laptop. How do I do it?
- Common Sense :- I monitor the links I’m clicking on and if it’s too good to be true, I check myself before clicking.
- Education :- I can’t get any tech news on the TV so I use the internet a lot to read up on latest threats and technologies.
- Common Sense:- Occasionally, I go through the programs installed on my PC to ensure that said programs are the latest versions. I can do this manually or the easy which is through the program, Secunia PSI. Secunia scans your computer and gives you a list of programs that are out-of-date so it saves you the trouble! It’s a no-brainer.
I could go on and on, but I won’t beat a dead horse. When in doubt about something, google.
It’s been awhile, but I had to break my blog silence to rant talk about my experience with Hostway. I registered my first domains (fadingwhispers.com and fadingwhispers.org) via Hostway and since I’ve been with Dreamhost for over 7 months, I decided on transferring registrars i.e. placing my domains in the care of Dreamhost. This would make sense because I got tired of essentially paying $12.95 per domain to Hostway for domain name renewals ($7.95) and Whois Protector Lite ($4.95). At Dreamhost, they automatically provide Whois protection at no cost and a fee of $9.99 for renewing the domain name.
Well, for someone who’s never done this before, Dreamhost has a short & sweet list of to-dos in order for your domain name transfer to successfully happen. Here are the brief rules:
1) Do not renew your domain name with the old registrar. This will throw a major wrench in the works as I learnt the hard way. Why? Because transfers of domain names are prohibited for 60 days after a domain name is registered or renewed.
2) Remove any Whois protection that prevents your real name and contact information from being viewed. Why? The new registrar needs to get in touch with you and they do that by reading information in Whois.
3) Oh and if you have a bogus email address in the Whois information, take this time to update that with a real email address. Again, the new registrar sends emails to the Admin or Tech contact listed on the Whois info page. If this is incorrect, you won’t receive that email telling you to click a certain link as proof that the domain name transfer was initiated by you. 
4) If your domain is locked to prevent accidental transfers, unlock the domain. My old registrar had this feature and I had it enabled on my accounts.
5) Auth codes are de rigueur now and make sure you have the auth codes to the domains you need transferred. If this is not an available option on your old registrar’s website, call them to get this code.
6) It is much less stressful to do 1 – 5 at once so that you don’t repeat the transfer process indefinitely versus doing 1 each time and realizing that I had to do the next step. In other words, Read the documents or RTFM.
Enjoy!
So, my tablet finally arrived. I was severely excited to be in possession of my toy. It didn’t break the bank but if has altered the way I use my computer. My main complaint has to be the fact that Firefox does not seem to be tablet-aware. Also, it has made me aware of how much my handwriting sucks! Unreal. It definitely has had an impact on the speed of my operations. For instance, I am composing this post entirely by hand. In any case, I have developed a greater appreciation for the fine art of writing legibly. Ha! Cheers to painfully relearning how to write beautifully. Oh, any typos are not my fault, I swear!
So, it’s been over a week since I had the Seagate FreeAgent GO drive in my possession and I have to say that the form factor has actually resulted in me using this drive to backup files more. It’s a little surreal for me because normally, I’m afraid to handle electronics, but the design of this GO drive makes it feel like it can handle the wear and tear of being in my backpack. With my Iomega eGo drive, I felt as if I could feel all the moving parts and I was exceedingly careful whenever I brought it out. Of course, I’m going to handle my gift (Thanks, Siobhan! ) with care, but all I’m saying is I feel like I don’t have to handle the Seagate GO drive with kid gloves.
The Seagate Manager comes with its backup program and an encryption utility as well. It’s a pretty straightforward backup program that allows you to pick and choose what folders you want to back up. A huge plus to Seagate for that. Second, the backed up files are not encoded in some proprietary format. If you backup a music or video file, you can browse the Seagate folder and see that your files are still the same. Not knocking Acronis True Image 2009 which stores backups in a .tib format, but sometimes, I just want the folder copied as-is without compression. So, in that respect, Seagate scored points with me. Obviously, a drawback of not compressing files is that you get a larger file size. However, with 500GBs to play with, I’m confident that I’ll have space for awhile. In any case, here is my backup strategy now:
- Make whole disc images of my computer monthly using Acronis True Image 2009 (which stores the image as a .tib file) and store this file on my Seagate FreeAgent Pro 500GB hard drive. I will keep at least 3 backups on hand, in case of the unexpected corrupt file.
- Using Seagate Manager, make backups of my Documents folder and other files. This can be done even daily if I choose, but I’ve set a alarm in Microsoft Outlook to remind me.
- Using Acronis True Image 2009, I’ll have, at least, 2 recent whole disk images of my laptop on my Seagate FreeAgent GO 500GB drive just in case I’m away from home (where the Seagate desktop drive lies) and I need to restore my computer (and this has happened quite a bit!).
That’s it for my ’strategy’, barring any unforeseen circumstances like me being lazy and forgetting to do it. Thankfully, speed is not an issue with this Seagate FreeAgent GO Drive because I was able to backup my Documents folder within 45minutes (it was just shy of 5Gbs in size). I’m on the go a lot and this drive suits my needs.
In a nutshell, I would pay for this drive, given what I know now about it.
Disclosure: The Seagate FreeAgent GO 500GB drive (~ $147) was received as a thank-you for participating in a case study. The links to this product have my Amazon affiliate id in them as well i.e. I get a little something if you use my link to purchase this product.
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