Digging for Data

Information is the life’s blood of every computer. The security of the information on computers has sprouted a niche industry of its own. Software that kills spyware, anti-virus software, and even spam blocking software were all constructed with the same goal in mind. To preserve the information on your computer from those that would seek to use it for nefarious purposes.
Knowing how to properly manage the information on your computer can help you recover information that you thought was deleted and also keep your information from those that are not privy to it. A general understanding of how information is processed on a computer can go a long way. Many people who are not comfortable with using computers believe that if they are working on a document and they don’t see it anymore, that the document is gone. This may have been the rule of thumb in years past, but not necessarily today. Documents that are being created are held in a temporary storage area called the RAM (Random Access Memory). They are subject to being lost, until they have been saved to permanent location like a floppy disk or hard drive. In recent years, computers and applications have been designed to provide another safety net to protect against the accidental lost of information. Many programs will ask you if you want to save a document every couple of minutes, while other programs will do it for you automatically. Another feature is that many programs will save the document that you are working on to a temporary file in the case of sudden power loss or an error within a program. The easiest way to recover lost data is to prevent losing it by saving your work frequently. Performing regular system backups would be advised. There are also third party data recovery programs ranging in from $40-$100 that can help with more difficult problems.
To protect your data, we approach the situation from the opposite angle. Not properly protecting the information on your computer could facilitate identity theft. We often hear reports of identity theft somewhere in the city, state, or nation. We can’t control most of those cases, but we can control the information on our individual computers. The first step is the easiest. Use a password on your computer. This may sound like a no brainer, but you would be surprised at how many people do not use a password to login to their computer. Most feel that there is nothing important on their computer so why bother. If you believe that then ask your self this. Would you let any stranger from the street come to your house to use your computer to see what information that they could find? Probably not. In addition to the cadre of anti-virus, anti-spam, and spyware killer software, it would not be a bad idea to invest in a software program to sanitize your hard drive. This will come in handy when you want to replace your hard drive.