cloud backup solution

It’s been a while since I’ve discussed backup solutions on this site, but it’s always worth refreshing our memories as to the importance of having a backup of anything important on your devices. One of the most common problems I see is not that someone doesn’t have a backup solution, but that they haven’t run a backup in a while because their process is a manual one and the user has forgotten or put it off in favour of more important tasks.

One important distinction to make is the difference between backup and archive. Whilst they do overlap, they are not the same thing.

An archive is typically a long term storage (potentially over many years) of information that perhaps is not needed from day to day, but you want to keep it just in case. An archive keeps growing and growing as more data is added. An archive is also typically stored on media that is not volatile and is designed to last the test of time. Most CDs/DVDs/USB or HDDs degrade over time, so finding the right media to store those precious memories is crucial.

A backup is typically used in disaster recovery cases such as a corrupt disk drive or a lost or stolen laptop.

There’s no reason why you cannot backup an archive too just in case one copy of those scanned photos from 1965 is not enough.

In my experience EVERYONE should run an automated backup of some kind and there are so many options available now that it’s easier than ever to have some kind of automated backup solution.

Self hosted solutions

You could consider a USB drive or perhaps a NAS to automate your backups. A NAS is typically a small, low powered, self contained disk storage computer, capable of providing many terabytes of storage and you would plug one of these into your router or switch. Today a NAS can be much more than just a backup device too. With solutions to stream movies to all your devices, including your TV, provide a fileserver to your PCs and Macs, even act as a CCTV security camera recorder. You can even run websites from many.

However, a self hosted solution is no good on its own if you wanted protection from a fire or flood in your home.

Cloud backup solution

Maybe delegate the responsibility to a cloud provider such as Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive or Dropbox. These solutions offload the responsibility of storage to servers elsewhere on the internet (that’s all the cloud really is). They can be easy and quick to set up and typically you pay by the Gigabyte for storage.

The downside is that you’ll likely pay a monthly fee which after a time can add up, plus it’s very likely that firms offering these services may not allow you to upload and store certain file types or sizes and may even use the data you upload for marketing purposes.

Why not drop us a line to discuss options and what you’re looking to achieve.

 

 

 

Trooli gigabit
By admin / Internet / 0 Comments

It looks like by the end of 2022 we may have an option for up to 1Gbit Fibre To The Home (FTTH) internet in Everton and the surrounding area.

A company called Trooli have started running fibre and I passed a Trooli van today on the side of the road near Fox Pond.

This is great news as we seem to be sandwiched between New Milton who have at least 1 provider of 1GBit internet supplied by CityFibre and Southampton who have a few options, most notably Toob for their extremely aggressive pricing.

Toob in Southampton are offering a 900Mbit up/900Mbit down service for £25 per month. Troolis pricing for a similar product (900Mbit down/300Mbit up) is a hefty £68 with the first month free. So almost 3 times the price for what seems like a lower tier of service.

Nonetheless, I see this as a good sign as competition in the shape of Openreach will almost definitely be coming down here too at some point in the future and we may then have a few options to choose from at last.

By admin / Uncategorized / 0 Comments

How to tell if an email is spam?

It’s an inevitable fact of life that spam exists and that it can sometimes become a major annoyance and sometimes really embarrassing too. There are so many email schemes going on right now and I wanted to write an article covering some of the ways to identify if the email is genuine or not.

Many spam emails have something in common; they want you to carry out an action, whether that be to click on a link, to open an attachment, to view an image, to call a number or perhaps to send a payment via Bitcoin.

If you’re in any doubt as to where the email has come from DO NOT display any embedded images, open any attachments, click on any embedded links, ring any numbers or send any online payments.

If you receive spam from what seems to be a genuine company such as Vodafone or perhaps Plus.net or BT.com, the first thing to consider is do you have an account with them already? If the answer is “yes” then we can move on to the next step. If the answer is “no” then its likely that you can ignore the message and delete it if its not useful to you.

Look at the FROM address and see if it looks familiar or that the bit after the @ sign is genuine. So for example, you might get an email from [email protected]. If your Vodafone email comes from anyone other than a Vodafone address, then its likely going to be some kind of spam.  I say likely as some legitimate companies will use a third party to deliver their marketing email. If in doubt, delete it.

If the FROM address looks correct then look at the copy of the email and see if there are any links present. If there are, don’t click on them, but if you hover your mouse cursor over the link, in many email programs it will show you the real address that you’ll be visiting and if this looks dodgy, don’t click on it! On a mobile device its a little different as you cannot hover your mouse, but I’ve founds that if you press and hold on a link on an Android or iOS device, it will give you options such as how you wish to open the link. Its at this stage that you can look at the link before really “clicking” on it to determine if it looks legitimate or not. If it looks dodgy, close the window and delete the email.

Are there any obvious grammatical or spelling errors? If there are then this should be ringing alarm bells. Any legitimate company should be spell and grammar checking their emails before they are sent out to 100,000s of people.

Heres a good example. I recently received an email allegedly from Gov.uk regarding an unsuccessful tax submission. The email below itself looks quite professional, but the FROM address (marked with a red box) is not an address I’d expect this email to come from so my spidey sense is tingling. On closer inspection, when I hover (not click) on the blue text link, the address (marked in a green box at the bottom) is certainly not an address I’d expect a valid gov.uk email to use.

The more astute among you will also notice some other interesting things in the image, namely that theres a bar running along the top (marked with a yellow box) mentioning “Paris”. This is displayed as I have a plugin which aims to tell me whereabouts an email has come from based on some invisible data within the email. Whilst this is not 100% accurate all the time, it does help with flagging emails that may not be genuine. This plugin is called “MailHops” for Mozilla Thunderbird, a really good email program from the same people who make the Firefox browser.

So adding all the evidence up, its incredibly likely that even if I would expect to get an email from gov.uk regarding the submission of taxes, this specific email is not genuine and it can been sent to the bin.

By admin / Gaming / / 0 Comments

Retro Gaming

I recall with fondness the very first time me and my sister received our first computer one Christmas Day in 1983. It was a Commodore 64 which came with one game called Cybertron Mission.

within 10 minutes we had the computer all set up on the TV and were playing the game.

When I reminisce about playing Cybertron Mission, a warm, vague mist descends and my memory tells me that the game was amazing with full colour graphics and 3 channel sound.

That feeling, more than the actual game itself is why I love retro games, after all many retro games let’s be honest are actually truly awful by today’s standards.

In the case of the Commodore 64, there was the delicious but agonising wait to save up enough pocket money to buy a new cassette from the local store. Then when you had the game in your possession it may have still taken many minutes to finally load into the computers memory. Ah the good old Commodore Datasette.

These days you can now emulate many old computer systems, such as the Commodore 64, Spectrum 48k, Amiga, Atari, even some of the more modern consoles such as the Wii and N64 can be readily emulated on modest modern computer hardware.

If the thought of retro games still gives you goosebumps, take a look at a project called retropie which uses a relatively inexpensive raspberry pi computer to emulate a whole range of old computer and gaming systems. Relive your mis-spent youth waggling your joystick to Daily Thompson’s Decathlon, or smashing the fire buttons on Galaga knowing that you’ll never need to insert an old 10p into the slot ever again.

Watch out for a future article where we will look into retropie in more depth, go through the install process and set up a retro arcade cabinet.

By admin / Hardware / / 0 Comments

What is a NAS drive?

NAS stands for Network Attached Storage. In other words some storage that is connected to your wired or WiFi network at home or in the office.

A NAS device is a dedicated mini computer consisting of one or more hard drives which are then set up so that your PCs, Apple Macs, iPhones and Android devices can see the space, save stuff to them and also pull stuff from them.

NAS devices for the home tend to be relatively small and quiet devices that sip power and are designed to run 24 hours a day, whereas large offices might have bigger devices mounted in specialist racks.

NAS devices can store any kind of file that you might store on a computer or mobile device and are ideal for use as backup devices when set up correctly, offering peace of mind if something goes wrong with your computer.

There are many makes and model size of NAS to fit all budgets. The Synology devices are some of our favourites as they tend to come with lots of additional software that you can install, much of it is free to enhance the capabilities of the NAS from a simple storage device to a complex security camera recording system for example.

There is another device type called SAN which might seem the same as a NAS at first glance, however SANs tend to be used in enterprise environments and operate in a different way.

By admin / Hardware / 0 Comments

Repurposing your old computer

You’re sat waiting for your ageing PC or Apple Mac to boot, thinking “maybe its time to buy another one?”. You can pick up a new PC for less than £200… with an operating system, which seems crazy cheap but in this age of throw away tech, it seems to be the way that most manufacturers are moving. Even the high end MacBook Pro laptops are not built as well as you might think, but their price point suggests otherwise.

What if you could repurpose your old laptop, PC or Apple Mac to be as fast as the day it were born? There is no special magic or sauce here. No clever dongle that promises to boost the speed of all the components on board. The potential solution comes from something called Linux.

You may have heard of Linux or perhaps Ubuntu. Linux is another Operating system, just like Mac OS or Windows. The difference is that most Linux distributions (we call them distros) are free to download and install. They come with a raft of tools to rival many Microsoft or Apple software and if installed correctly, Linux can provide a boost of speed and give new purpose to an otherwise perfectly good but ageing computer.

Now, lets be clear, you’re not going to get Microsoft Internet Explorer or Edge. Your not going to get Word, Excel, Powerpoint or Outlook on Linux (at least not yet), but you can get some very good alternatives such as Libre Office for your Office siute replacement, Mozilla Firefox or Chromium to replace Internet Explorer/Edge and Mozilla Thunderbird to replace Outlook for email, making this a perfectly useable internet ready PC once more.

If you’re confident to have a go at installing Linux yourself, then head over to https://www.ubuntu.com/#download and download the desktop version yourself. However if you would like to discuss this further, drop us a line and we can provide a personalised quotation for installing a new Linux operating system and all the software you may need.

Data Backup

Backup, Backup and Backup

One of the most common issues I encounter when fixing a computer is the lack of regular backup. If the computer that I’m asked to fix has a faulty Hard Disk Drive or SSD, then its likely that some/all data on that drive will be lost… forever.

There are some software tricks we can employ to try and get the data, but if the disk itself simply will not start, then recovery of important thinsg such as family photos, important documents, emails, family videos etc. is increasingly slim and also increasingly expensive, running into £1000s to send the disk away to a special dust free laboratory where engineers will try (and there are no guarantees) to recover as much data as they can.

These days, there really isn’t any excuse not to have some kind of backup in place, whether thats a second USB Hard Disk that you plug in each week or month, or perhaps an online solution such as our own Cloud backup solution, Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsofts OneDrive, or even perhaps whats called a NAS (Network Attached Storage is an unassuming box of disks that acts as a kind of central repository for all your backup files across all your devices). I’ll talk about NAS boxes and options in a future Blog entry.

Many of the online solutions (including own own) provide some free space to start you off. If you already subscribe to Microsofts own Office 365, you’ll have 1TB (1 Terabyte or 1000 Gigabyes) of online storage included, so what are you waiting for? Don’t put off setting up a backup until its too late.

 

 

internet security child family

Protecting your family online

Protection for the Family

There are plenty of services and software that help to protect you and your loved ones online from nasty website, phishing attacks, viruses and malware. I read a recent article http://robert.ocallahan.org/2017/01/disable-your-antivirus-software-except.html and wondered if anti-virus was more of a hinderance than a help? Now the caveat. If you’re using copied/hacked/illegally downloaded  software or if you frequent dubious sites then you might wish to consider some options to protect yourself, using one of the many anti-virus solutions out there. After all you really don’t know how the software has been modified or even if the software you’ve procured is indeed what it says it is.

For the rest of us I do wonder if a constantly running anti-virus solution is actually having a negative effect on our PCs, especially lower end ones? I’ve decided to uninstall my kaspersky anti-virus software, which incidentally I purchased as it supposedly had the smallest footprint and the lowest impact of many of the mainstream anti-virus solutions out there, and I’ve promoted Microsofts Windows Defender to the forefront once more.

But that’s not all, an anti-virus solution will only protect the PC its running on and I wanted to also provide web safety for my family too. My two young children (9 and 12) have their own PCs and tablets and are regularly online these days. They are confronted with the World Wide Web in its entirety. From the BBCs Timmy Time to less suitable website starring naked men and women carrying out all kinds of sexual acts. An innocent search online can lead to some really worrying websites.

Many ISPs now offer free family safety solutions directly through their service and these can be turned on and off theorh the ISPs own control panel. However they may not give you much control over what you deem to be suitable content for your children or even adults. That’s where OpenDNS comes in. OpenDNS acts as a gatekeeper of sorts to the web, filtering out domain names and web services that fall into specific categories such as alcohol, dating, gambling, weapons and pornography to name a few. There are four pre-configured levels of protection, high, moderate, low and none and if these aren’t enough you can also customise the categories chosen as well.

In addition to this, you can also specify domain names that might not fit into any of these categories in a white or black list, allowing you to block everything except bbc.co.uk for example.

This is all carried out by modifying two settings  in your router/modem called the DNS servers. Its these DNS servers that are the signposts to websites, so essentially OpenDNS stops some of these signposts from working. Nice!

If you configure the DNS at the router/modem level, each and every device that uses that routers connectivity, whether that’s wired or wireless would typically use these DNS settings so there’s normally little else to do. Of course, there’s a way around this and that’s to configure your device to not use the OpenDNS servers but perhaps use Googles own DNS (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4). If a PC or mobile was manually configured to use anything other than OpenDNS, you would  essentially bypass the security offered but most kids won’t know where to look (at least not until their teenage years).

Getting rid of adverts/speeding up web browsing

Another issue that many of us have is the incessant advertising we receive in websites and also in games. You have to remember that advertising funds the future development of websites and games and many developers rely on it to keep their services essentially “free”. The moment you stop ads being delivered, that’s also stopping their revenue. That said, I found that adverts were making my little netbook grind to a halt. Many adverts now are video based while some contain mini games and once you’ve downloaded three or four of these per page, a low end device really starts to crawl.

You can get around this by installing ad blocker software or plugins on your browser and on each and every device that you wish to block ads. This will certainly speed up browsing, but there’s a trade off as the ad blocker itself typically uses processing power to block ads. But there is a better way to block ads across your entire home network with nothing more than a Raspberry Pi and a single line of code.

Something called pi-hole recently came to my attention, so I spent a little time booting up my old Raspberry Pi 1, installing a fresh version of Raspbian Operating System and then running the pi-hole command. Within minutes I had a dedicated DNS server which uses OpenDNS as the Upstream DNS Servers. What does all that mean? Well essentially, pi-hole has a huge list of all the domains that tend to serve ads and it downloads them to itself. You then tell your home devices to use the pi-hole as their DNS server either by configuring your router (see above) or by manually adding the pi-hole IP address as the DNS server to each PC/phone/tablet. When your device makes a request to a domain that’s listed in pi-hole, the ad is essentially blocked before its even downloaded. The great thing about pi-hole is that you can use it in tandem with openDNS, giving you dual protection.

Pi-hole is free software and a Raspberry Pi with a case, SDCard and power supply would set you back around £45.

So whats next? Now that my little Raspberry Pis running again and feeling quite proud of itself, I’m going to see how well a Minecraft Server will run from it while pi-hole is running.

Strong-Password

How secure is my password

A question that we get asked regularly is “how secure is my password” and there unfortunately is no simple answer, however it is possible to figure out roughly how vulnerable you might be. There are some simple rules that we should follow when it comes to password creation and I’ve listed these below:

  1. make sure your passwords are at least 16 characters long
  2. use a different password for each service you use
  3. ensure that your password is not based on a dictionary word (in any language) or indeed any word that might be easy to guess
  4. ensure that your password contains a variety of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and also special characters such as $ % and * for example
  5. change your passwords every 3 months

Thats actually quite a daunting list but according to tools online such as http://random-ize.com/how-long-to-hack-pass/ my newly created password that fits all the above criteria might take 420,805,123,888,006 years and 6 months to crack. Thats a long long time but even thats not stricty accurate and I may discuss this in a future blog article, but simply mention “Moores Law” or more the death of Moores Law and the advent of Quantum Computing. As a comparison the password “password” can be guessed within 1 minute and 13 seconds, and thats if the computer doing the guessing isn’t cycling through commonly used passwords first.

If we consider that the only way we’re likely to remember these passwords is to use a piece of software such as a bespoke password manager, or even the web browser itself as many of them offer the ability to remember passswords or perhaps spreadsheet then ideally we should also be password protecting this source too, in case our computer gets hacked and vital data is exposed to the hacker. We could write them all down on a piece of paper and file that away, however my writing is atrocious and did I write a “1” or an “l”, a “O” or a “0”.

The more pressing issue is remembering all these passwords for each and every service. If we were to follow the above 5 points then I expect that we would be continually requesting password reminders. But is that really such a bad thing? After all if we’re asking for a password reset every time we need to log in, we’re potentially fulfilling point 5 while of course fulfilling all the other points as well?