Backups: My "uh oh" moment and what I do now for prevention and recovery

End users generally think, "I've saved the document, I'm all good". They put it into the computer and it'll always be there, ready for when they need it.

My "uh oh" wake up moment with regards to data integrity and backups was a long time ago now. It all started with an Athlon 1.4 system I built for myself. I also built a similarly equipped unit for my parents. Both from parts I purchased at a computer "swap meet" (very rarely these days involving any actual swapping). They both consisted of an MSI motherboard, the AMD CPU, RAM, Sony CD Burner, an ASmart Nvidia based AGP4x card, Creative SoundBlaster Live (which would later fail and make everything sound like cartoon chipmunks), a cheap PSU that came with the case ("Hairong"??), Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional and an IBM hard disk - a 40GB DeskDeathstar (I can sense some of you out there groaning now).

Previously to this, I'd used several machines with several types of hard disk (Maxtor, Seagate, WD, Fujitsu etc.) and never had a problem. I hadn't yet suffered a drive failure and so never really considered it would be a problem.

Well, I copped the Deathstar curse.. bad!

Protecting against ransomware - is this possibly a different way of thinking about it in the SOHO space?

Recently my folks got an email from their ISP (Westnet) scaring them, thinking they'd been hacked (it turns out an old Westnet user database had been compromised, along with cleartext usernames and passwords... oopsies?).

Before I figured out what it was, I was thinking suspicious activity had been detected on their accounts and was worried about whether or not they'd backed up recently... then my thoughts turned to cryptoware and how it basically spreads out to whatever it touches and encrypts everything (had someone else hit by a bug recently - and I'm moving them and their formerly Windows XP computer to Lubuntu as they only need Windowsish looking email, web browsing and printing).

Anyway.. long setup aside, I was thinking, that perhaps the best way to deal with backups and cryptoware, was to have the system that needed to be backed up make itself available to an authorised backup storage provider by some restricted and secured means (over a LAN or encrypted link). That backup storage provider could be prodded by the client system to perform a pull, but the client would never have direct, unrestricted access to the backup server's archives.

How to turn off showing the margins (aka whitespace) in Excel 2010 Page Layout mode

It was driving me nuts at work, this particular spreadsheet we have. On two tabs it was showing the margins, and on two other tabs, it wasn't. I didn't need to see the margins, and for the life of me I couldn't figure out how to make things consistent.. Then I figured it out when I hovered my mouse over the area!