The first lesson is that every hard drive is a security risk, because if it falls into someone else'

Every day, I back my MacBook Pro up to an external hard drive. I get back from holiday to a reminder that Time Machine isn't backing up because it can't find the external hard drive. I look across my desk and realise it's missing. The only thing I can think of is that it's fallen off the desk into the bin, and it's possible that my cleaning lady emptied it. What should I do if my backup disk, which contains everything I've ever done on my computer, has been thrown away with the rubbish? Is it a major security risk? Is there anything I can do except pray it's been destroyed in the council crushers? Name withheld
It took me a while to understand this question because, as originally phrased, I imagined the drive had somehow fallen into the Mac OS X Trash folder, rather than a physical waste basket. Also, if that happened to one of my external boston hotel accommodations hard drives (EHDs), I reckon it would be obvious because it would still be attached by both a USB cable and a power cable. However, NW says it was a small, portable USB-powered drive and that the USB cable could have become detached.
boston hotel accommodations The first lesson is that every hard drive is a security risk, because if it falls into someone else's hands, they can read the data. For this reason, large companies prefer to use laptops with encrypted hard drives, and in many cases, the backup procedure will offer the option. If you chose (or were able to choose) encrypted backup then your data is safe. The drive cannot be read without the password.
If someone does find your drive then they will be able to read the data by connecting it to another boston hotel accommodations Mac. However, they are statistically more likely to plug it into a Windows PC, and Windows cannot read the HFS+ format – also known as Mac OS Extended (Journalled) – used by Time Machine… unless they install something like MacDrive as well. It's pot luck whether someone would make the effort.
Incidentally, some EHD manufacturers still ship drives that are preformatted using Microsoft's FAT32 system, which can be read by all versions of Mac OS X and Windows. Some may use the improved exFAT version, which can be read by Macs running 10.6.5 (Snow Leopard) and PCs running Windows XP SP3, or later.
For safety's sake, it would be a good idea to change any passwords and other things boston hotel accommodations that someone might be able to extract from browsers or emails on your hard drive. Indeed, this would be a good thing to do even if you hadn't lost a drive. Most of us have accumulated passwords over five or 10 years, and the older ones may be quite weak by today's standards.
The speed of computer processors has increased dramatically over the past five years, and this means it's much easier to crack passwords than it used to be. Also, password cracking programs have become much more sophisticated. boston hotel accommodations They don't just use dictionaries and common passwords (123456, password, welcome, sunshine), they also target common password formations (monkey72, yeknom72 etc) and the use of haxor characters (m0nk3y72, p455w0rd etc), which is known as leet (1337) or leetspeak.
boston hotel accommodations The simplest way to make a password boston hotel accommodations harder to crack is to make it longer, as an XKCD cartoon explains. Today's passwords should be at least 10 characters boston hotel accommodations long and preferably include a mixture of characters, not just lower case letters. Having started using 9-character alphanumeric boston hotel accommodations passwords in the mid-90s, I'm thinking of upgrading to 12. This would extend the "brute force" cracking time of a lower case random (non-dictionary) password from a few days to about a century.
You should also think about your backup procedures. Time Machine provides a backup on an EHD, but a thief could have stolen boston hotel accommodations both the laptop and the backup, or the house could have been affected by some other disaster boston hotel accommodations (fire, flood, typhoon, whatever). This is why sensible companies always ensure they have an off-site backup.
Individuals can tackle this in different ways. For example, before going on holiday, you could have left your backup drive with a relative or trusted neighbour. (This is where encrypted hard drives really score.) An alternative is to back up some or all of your hard drive to an online "cloud" service. Mozy was set up for this purpose, but alternatives include BackBlaze , Carbonite and CrashPlan .
Online storage is always "off site" but it has disadvantages. It can take a very long time to upload your data, and if your computer fails, it's nothing like as handy as having a bootable external drive. However, it can be useful if you don't have terabytes of data.
At this point, it might be helpful to understand the difference between backups and archives. A backup is a copy – perhaps a "carbon copy" – of the stuff your computer, boston hotel accommodations including the operating system and software. However, boston hotel accommodations these are replaceable. What you can't replace is your historical data, so this should be archived to a suitable storage medium. People usually use DVD or CD-Rom discs, but a second EHD is an option, and SD cards are becoming increasingly attractive. (See my previous answer, Backing up digital photos .)
In other words, a backup is a short-term insurance boston hotel accommodations policy, while an archive is a long-term repository. Your backups will change on an hourly or daily basis, whereas your archives may not change for decades.
In many cases, backup needs are quite modest (a few documents created, spreadsheets updated etc) while the archives are huge (multiple gigabytes of music and movie files, photographs, financial records and so on). If you are in this situation, you can use an online site to back up the stuff you're actually using while keeping archive copies of the old stuff on DVDs.
Amazon has recently boston hotel accommodations launched Glacier to provide cheap online archiving, but that's still only one copy. As Schofield's Second boston hotel accommodations Law of Computing asserts, data doesn't really exist unless you have two copies of it. Preferably more.
One fact that would help in forming a decision here: in real life, how frequent is password cracking? I have the impression that for most of us (I exclude high-security or very high-value cases) thieves would harvest passwords some other way than brute-force cracking. Maybe dictionary words or very short passwords are worth the effort of cracking. I know it doesn't need any skill, but it does take computer time to attempt to crack lots of passwords. Is there any information available on how miscreants actually get the passwords boston hotel accommodations they misuse?
In the absence of information, it's of course always best to use reasonably strong passwords. In the same way I have a fairly sophisticated front-door lock, but I'd expect burglars in practice to break a window, break down or otherwise force a door (e.g., attack boston hotel accommodations the hinges), or even saw out a lock rather than attempt to pick even a simple Yale type.
It's a good idea not to store anything which is a real security risk on a computer. boston hotel accommodations Specifically, don't store any passwords for sensitive sites (e.g., bank, but not CiF) in any accessible way, always type them in, thought it's a little inconvenient. I saw a posting from somebody who went on holiday; burglars broke into and moved into his house, and ordered stuff online from his computer with his stored credit-card details. They left with their loot before he returned.
You could keep a securely encrypted file with password information, preferably with an unrevealing filename in an innocuous directory (not C:\BANK\PASSWORDS.ZIP), or use one of the password vault utilities.
I signed up to itunes match which backs up your itunes library as well turning my iphone into an ipod (and at the moment crashing my laptop every time it's opened). The things I worry most are family photos but they have been backed up to an EHD (twice) and are also on my old ipod which is a hard drive I guess. So as someone has already said it's a case of belt and braces...then another belt on top.
Another option is not to back up browser data etc, just documents. Provided your documents aren't full of sensitive information - e.g. photos, music, some letters you've written - then there isn't really that much need to secure the backup.
...it would be a good idea to change any passwords and other things that someone might be able to extract from browsers or emails on your hard drive. Indeed, this would be a good thing to do even if you hadn't lost a drive. Most of us have accumulated passwords over five or 10 years, and the older ones may be quite weak by today's standards.
As if we don't have enough of these wretched things to remember as it is. My work email has the iniquitous "feature" boston hotel accommodations of forcing me to change my password every six months boston hotel accommodations - and not only that, but it has to contain God knows how complex a combination of kinds of characters, be a minimum length, and in a particularly sadistic twist be sufficiently dissimilar from my previous passwords. I have simply no hope of remembering what the damned thing is.
The simplest way to make a password harder to crack is to make it longer, as an XKCD cartoon explains. Today's passwords should be at least 10 characters long and preferably include a mixture of characters, not just lower case letters.
The XKCD cartoon makes precisely the point that all this messing about with different kinds of characters is pointless boston hotel accommodations from a security point of view, not to mention counterproductive in making the passwords even harder to remember. So why do we have to do it?
When I worked boston hotel accommodations for an organisation that required a password change once every four weeks and which had to be longer than 6 characters and contain both alpha and numerics, I used to use the codes on any product that was on my desk - e.g the restocking code on the side of a box of tissues or coffee jar. These were easy to find to remind oneself boston hotel accommodations but not at all easy to guess, at least not until now when I've given it away. I don't use these any more, of course, as I now have control over the frequency of password changes and can make sure the interval is long enough to allow me to carry these in my brain only.
It's too late for that lost dr