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.

Disaster Recovery - Image Backups

If your computer failed or got a virus today how much time and money would it cost to get it working again? In most cases it will take an entire day or two to get all of the data off of the computer and reinstall all of the programs and settings.

If you have an image backup of your computer it can be restored within an hour depending on how much data you keep.

An Image Backup is a snapshot in time of a computer (desktop, laptop or server).

Here is an example of how an image backup works: An image backup of a computer is taken of all of the data on the hard drive and saved to another hard drive. A week later the computer then gets a nasty root-kit virus that makes the computer unusable. Using the image backup taken the week prior the computer is restored completely. All of the settings and files are restored.

An image backup can be made of the computer manually or automatically.

A great time to make an image backup of a computer is right after one has their computer just the way they like it. Incremental backups can also be made daily.

In order to better protect your computer we would like to make a manual image backup or setup daily automatic backups on your working computer now.


For more information concerning image backups:
http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/