A Very Scary Last Few Days!
Jun 26th, 2008 by kenopoly
Well, it happens to everyone and it hasn’t happened to me in several years now but I guess it was just my turn!
Monday night I came home from work (actually, early Tuesday morning!) and decided I would check some stuff on the computer. I typed in my password and logged on and the first thing I got was a big, red box saying “Trojan.Win32.Monder has been detected”! Wow! Welcome home, huh?
Anyways, I went through several of these and my antivirus program was deleting them as they came up. I then ran my Ad-Aware software and it found several instances and deleted them. Restarted the computer and, guess what? Yep, same thing! I messed around for a while and finally went to bed. I tried again the next afternoon before work and never could get rid of it. I was so frustrated. All my genealogy, pictures and other important info was on this computer and none of it had been backed up! I have been so busy lately that I probably haven’t done a backup in 6 months now! I wish I had taken the time to listen to all the folks who have been writing about the need to backup!
Well, today I did it! I formatted my hard drive and reinstalled Windows and now I am back in business. The virus is gone and everything seems to be OK! What happened to my research and the rest of it? It’s OK! At least it seems to be. I have a second hard drive and I moved all my images and such to that hard drive and have been scanning them as I move them back. No infections yet. Of course, they are mostly .jpg or .tiff files and a few gedcoms.
But what if? What if I didn’t have that second hard drive to move that to? I really would suggest to everyone that you should look into backing up your information. You don’t have to lose it in a natural disaster. Sometimes it could be as simple as your children logging on to MySpace and doing something that they shouldn’t do! It only takes a moment and you could lose everything.
There have been several good posts about backing up your research lately. I would highly suggest you do a search on blogger for those posts and take advantage of the knowledge of a few who have lost everything or have came very close to losing everything (research wise). I know I will be checking in to Mozy sometime this weekend.
Ken:
There is no better advice. I took a laptop on a genealogical trip and scanned hundreds of photographs. I didn’t put them on a back-up, not even a zip drive. When I got home the computer died and took those photos with it to an early grave. Those photographs are no longer available having been spread to the winds. I learned my lesson - the hard way.
fM