Virus

[fpb]

I got a horrendous virus last night and I had to reformat and rewrite my whole hard drive. I had of course saved everything I could think of on external hard drives, but I only realized after starting work that I had lost all my favourites/bookmarks. And it took me hours just to get the machine restarted and properly online. Still, it could have been a Hell of a lot worse.

Comments

[hermoinejean7.livejournal.com]

Why you should totally use Google Chrome as your browser: You can sync bookmarks with your Gmail account, and then see bookmarks on any version of Chrome on any computer. (Yes, even if you re-install Chrome, because it's all in your mail account.)

/Shar was advertising Chrome again. :S

Sorry you had to re-format; viruses of all kinds suck!

[sevenorora.livejournal.com]

Another option is saving your bookmarks on delicious. It's quite handy :-)

Kudos!

[theeditrix.livejournal.com]

Sorry for your trouble, but I compliment your foresight! I am such a scatterbrain and have lost countless valuable data because of that.

Re: Kudos!

[fpb.livejournal.com]

It's not over yet. I shoved everything shovable into the external HDs after the virus had got in (mind you, about 90% of my records were there already) and therefore it is absolutely certain that the monster itself is still lurking there - I mean in one or both of the HDs. Of course I haven't connected them with the computer again. But once I was able to go back online, I looked it up and found a freeware utility intended to destroy that specific virus (a piece of malware that tries to force you to buy a supposed antivirus called Antivir - a scam, pure and simple, but a very efficient one). So, as soon as I have time, I will download said utility and clean the external HDs.

Everything I learned about security I learned through blood, sweat and tears. I have had to delete whole memories at least twice. But it's not happening again if I can help it.

[guarani]

Yes, it could have been worse. Last month I lost a hard disk with a number of documents. I was in the process of backing them up and was done with 2009. 2010 was lost. There was no way to recover them even with special tools that check the contents of the disk at low levels. Now I have finished installing the box again, this time with two disks and a RAID arrangement.