I must be getting rust on the brain.

[Greg from K/W]

I am expecting a delivery for a few things I wanted from Princess Auto. Got an email that said a delivery was on the way and bang wrong one. It was a virus and I didn't pay attention to what it was or where it was from. Had to wipe my whole system and do a complete system restore.

Be careful I was tired and opened it. I lost all my contacts book marks photos music personal documents. Everything. I had no back up other than the original system back up. Its really going to suck trying to rebuild this machine. Take care not to open Zip files when your tired guys. I will be looking 2 or 3 or 4 times before I open another file like that.

[DMartin]

What is the anti-virus software that you are using ? Reason for asking is I had my anti-virus warn me once of a virus but not sure that it would pick up all viruses ? I'm using McAfee. Dan

[Greg from K/W]

I was using Avira. Not now. I just upgraded to F Secure. Full suite. I have everything locked down now. No way this is happening again. It updates 4 or 5 times a week.

[dwoody]

I have used Norton for years and never had a problem, so its another good alternative.

[willr]

I was using Avira. Not now. I just upgraded to F Secure. Full suite. I have everything locked down now. No way this is happening again. It updates 4 or 5 times a week.

Get this or something like it...
http://www.acronis.com/index.html

The workstation backup can do a "bare metal" restore -- even to a different machine. I have done it. It works.
http://www.acronis.com/backup-recovery/workstation/

Get yourself an external USB/eSATA drive 2TerraByte and do occasional complete backups.

Even then... you find that you are not as up to date as you would like -- but it's less worse. On my last trip here my HD quit when I took a side-trip/vacation to PV. So I could not check in etc. When I came back to the office I bought a new drive -- expensive here -- then used the external copy to restore -- then I put the failed drive in the enclosure and recovered additional material.

My sympathy...

[Greg from K/W]

Ya THe worst thing I lost was my resume's Had 3 or 4 made up so I could apply to different types of jobs. But I have a good job now so I may not need them again. Wait and see.

[kevinhanna]

Ya THe worst thing I lost was my resume's Had 3 or 4 made up so I could apply to different types of jobs. But I have a good job now so I may not need them again. Wait and see.

If you had e-mailed those resumes out would they still exist in you 'Sent' folder (gmail for example encourages you to keep all sent and received mail) or on Workopolis or Monster?

I haven't run anti-virus on my personal machines for years (not recommending the practice). But I do make backups. Not full system wide backups, but things like photos and documents are stored on my local hard drive, and rsync'ed nightly to my network attached storage (which is RAID 1, fully redundant) and then, they are also stored by Google (Docs, Picassa, Gmail...). So as long as my house is standing and Google doesn't simultaneously lose my account (and the redundant Google Apps account that all my e-mail is stored on also) I can recover.

Nothing worse than those 'Oh Sh*t' moments that cost you so much time and or money. 1 second lapse in judgement.

K.

[hawk223]

Backing up is good advise! Even if you don't get a virus hard drives do fail. I've lost at least four drives but i do have a lot of them.

I haven't been impressed by Norton. It has always seemed to cause more issues than its worth. McAfee is my preference especially for the Enterprise market. I use AVG at home. I used to use McAfee at home but plain and simply got sick and tired of having to confirm that I paid for it every few weeks. I won't pay for harassment. I'm happy with AVG now and see no reason to change.

[kevinhanna]

I haven't been impressed by Norton. It has always seemed to cause more issues than its worth. McAfee is my preference especially for the Enterprise market. I use AVG at home. I used to use McAfee at home but plain and simply got sick and tired of having to confirm that I paid for it every few weeks. I won't pay for harassment. I'm happy with AVG now and see no reason to change.

Back around 2002 a coworker and I filled out a new virus report to McAfee. We supplied details about the background process that hogged CPU, memory and IO resources to the point where the machine was nearly unusable. The program we were reporting was their virus scanner. They've improved in this regard several fold (or at least the processing power of the machines has made it nearly unnoticeable). But they've found other methods of making the cure worse than the disease

[Rusty]

Had AVG for years and it failed a couple of times. Finally the last time it my guy 2 days to restore everything and fix my laptop and desktop. He recommended Kaspersky and that's what I have on 3 machines now. It's been great for 6 months or so.

[SwampDonkey]

I've had Norman (not Norton) for 14 years and have never been bit. I get several updates weekly.