Picture Backups

We had to help someone last week to recover all of their pictures from a broken computer disc in their laptop. Luckily for the person involved, the disc was not physically damaged, they had just accidentally deleted them, but had then emptied the Waste Bin for good measure! A total of 2,800 pictures potentially lost.

Of course the first question we asked was to use their back-up to make a restore. The silence was very loud! No only had they not backed-up up any of their pictures, they had tried to reinstall Windows as this was what they had been told was required by a helpful friend! Luckily, they had failed to complete the reinstall for what ever reason and after the Laptop refused to boot, they called us.

After a short while we had found their pictures on the disc, got them back in the right place and made a backup onto a spare disc that we have and smiles abounded.

As we have said a number of times here and on our previous site – Back Up Your Data. Small, by that we mean physically, USB disc drives can be purchased for as little as £50.00 and are big enough – storage wise to cope with most laptop discs that are around today.

We’re going to look into Back-Ups again here on SeniorNet UK as there is also the ongoing discussions about using Cloud based backups and whether you still need to keep a physical copy locally – by the way, we think you should.

But in the meantime here is another new player PictureLife that offer Cloud base storage of your picture content with access from anywhere, anytime. We did not look at this one in our recent Cloud Storage post, but we will have a more detailed review at their offering and some others and let you know in another post.

In the meantime, please Back Up your data, somewhere.

We were hacked, but backups rule.

Woke up this morning to find that the website had been hacked, I won’t go into the details of what it was, if you saw it, you know.

Anyway, as I have mentioned in the past, making sure that you have valid backups is one of the most vital points in preserving your data/website/content etc.

I am not a big WordPress ‘under-the-hood’ expert, but after a quick search of the WordPress Codex, I identified what was needed to fix it and restored the relevant files from my backup of Friday. As well as the nightly backups that take place, I always also make an export to XML (there’s that acronym again) of my content via the WordPress tools option.

Need to do a bit more of an investigation and talk with my Web Hosting Company – UK2.Net – about how this may have happened, but the moral of this tale has to be, always make backups.

Update – 14:00 10th Feb. 2013

Looked further into this as I still can’t get any response from the Web Hosting Company I think what happened is that the hacker got into the server at the Web Hosting Company and simply replaced all the content in my index.html (non WP sites) and index.php files with their stuff.

I am not sure how many other companies are sharing the same server, but it will be interesting to see happens over the next few hours. I have seen one tweet referencing the Web Hosting Company, but as yet no details. Worrying.