Alvah's Books

I was reading through the tweets when I discovered one that J. Kaye wrote about another book blogger, Gautami Tripathy. Gautami’s blog, Reading Room, was lost to malware. She managed to recuperate some of her posts and now has a new blog, Everything Distils Into Reading.

If you blog, read blogs, or do anything at all on the computer, you should know by now the importance of backing up your work. A lot of things can happen. Your computer could be infected by some malicious virus; your hardware (as was my case) can go kaput; or your laptop could be stolen.   

So back up and there’s a number of ways to do it:

• Copy your work on disks.
•  If you don’t want to deal with a growing stack of disks, set up an account through Google and save all your important documents on Google Docs.
• Set up an account via Norton that backs up your files. 
• Use a USB drive with enough guts to save your files.
• Think of your laptop as your baby, don’t leave it alone or in the care of strangers.

Also don’t forget to run your virus protection software. What is malware? This is what Wikipedia has to say,

Malware, a portmanteau from the words malicious and software, is software designed to infiltrate or damage a computer system without the owner’s informed consent. The expression is a general term used by computer professionals to mean a variety of forms of hostile, intrusive, or annoying software or program code. The term “computer virus” is sometimes used as a catch-all phrase to include all types of malware, including true viruses.

Software is considered malware based on the perceived intent of the creator rather than any particular features. Malware includes computer viruses, worms, trojan horses, most rootkits, spyware, dishonest adware, crimeware and other malicious and unwanted software. In law, malware is sometimes known as a computer contaminant, for instance in the legal codes of several U. S. states, including California and West Virginia.

Malware is not the same as defective software, that is, software which has a legitimate purpose but contains harmful bugs.

Preliminary results from Symantec published in 2008 suggested that “the release rate of malicious code and other unwanted programs may be exceeding that of legitimate software applications.” According to F-Secure, “As much malware [was] produced in 2007 as in the previous 20 years altogether.” Malware’s most common pathway from criminals to users is through the Internet: primarily by e-mail and the World Wide Web.

To read more about malware go to Wikipedia’s Malware article.