The Best Way to Recovery From a Virus

We clean up viruses and/or malware every week.  Sometimes the user could have prevented their infestation, and other times they could not.  Antivirus software has to be able to protect your computer from  every virus that is on the planet.  With odds like that there is no way any Antivirus software can protect a computer from all of the viruses and malware out there.  The only real solution is data abstinence.  Never get on the internet and never add any media to your computer.  Since we must get on the internet and we must enter media into our computers to make them useful we have to come up with a better plan.  The better plan is a full system backup.

Full system backups (bare bones backups) are a snapshot in time of a computer.  If a snapshot is taken at 3:00 AM and the computer gets a devastating virus at 5:00 PM.  The computer can be restored to its’ previous state at 3:00 AM before it contracted the virus.

Windows 7 has Windows Backup, and Mac has Time Machine for full system backups.   If your computer does not have Windows 7 you will need to go with a third party backup software.  I use Acronis True Image Home (www.acronis.com)  for my PC’s because it gives me additional options for alerts and file management.

Whether it is a virus, hard drive failure or a user error, full system backups will save you time, money and headache.