>Hi all,
>
>I do some work on the side for a couple of clients and this past week I got a nasty virus on my laptop (only have one computer). I took it to a guy that fixes computers and he has to reformat the drive and luckily I did some manual backups onto an external drive a couple of weeks ago but still need to get into the computer to retrieve some newer files which the guy fixing the laptop will do. This is going to cost me a lot of time and be a MAJOR headache, so it kind of woke me up that I should have been more professional in terms of keeping my work secure and organized.
>
>Basically my question is what is the best way to keep my work secure and organized.
>
>This is what I think I would like:
>
>- Have 2 laptops, 1 STRICTLY for work, 1 for personal
>
>- Work laptop (XP Professional)
> * Have a good antivirus (any recommendations?) and the latest updates
> * Set my account not to have installations priviledges? (when I need to install something log in as administrator)
> * Have some type of software that can automatically save my data to an external hard drive:
> ---- What software/method do you guys recommend?
> ---- Maybe online backup?
> * Have some sort of image of my computer in the case my hard drive dies I can get another computer and install this image and be up and running. This is the software that must be in the image among others:
> ---- VFP 9 SP2
> ---- SQL Server 2000
> ---- SQL Server 2005 Express
> ---- Visual SourceSafe
>
>- Personal Laptop (Windows 7 Professional - 64 bit)
> ---- Probably install VFP 9 and SQL Server as an emergency measure
>
>I do have a router and is password protected.
>
>I'm getting my data out of my infected computer, I'm getting of course my development folder for my projects, the sql server data files, my visual sourcesafe files, My documents folder. What else should I be thinking about? Any other issues when I need to put these back into my cleaned/reformatted computer?
>
>Thanks!
>
>
>(On a second note, unfortunately the guy that's fixing the computer doesn't seem to good at doing that, while I was trying to get rid of all the malware/virus I ran a boot antivirus CD (Avira) and set it to rename a file if it couldn't fix it, so after doing that now I can't log in, after loggin it automatically logs me off. I saw a few solutions on the net for that, he spent 10 minutes looking into that and said he had to reformat everything, seems such a short time to give up on fixing this problem)

I second the other ideas you've received so far.

Backups are your *only* true protection. Make sure you have one or more backups at an alternate location e.g. safety deposit box at your bank to protect against fire, theft etc. With backups, there are only 2 types of people: true believers, and those who are about to become true believers.

Image backups are great, but it can sometimes be more convenient to also have file backups of your critical stuff; it can be time-consuming restoring just a few files from an image.

Antivirus: Microsoft Security Essentials has been getting decent reviews. Bear in mind AV is of no use against fast-breaking, "zero-day" threats.

I *strongly* recommend using a browser other than IE for all web browsing except sites or services that absolutely require it. Google Chrome has consistently been the most secure browser since its introduction. FireFox with the NoScript plugin by default prevents any Javascript, Java, Flash and PDFs from running/loading, which prevents a lot of potential threats. You can enable these as needed for trusted sites.

Virtual machine technology is very useful for testing and temporary configurations. Craig pointed out Windows XP mode, which is available for free on Win7 Pro or higher. I've had success working with Sun VirtualBox, which is also a free download: http://www.virtualbox.org/

With VMs you can consider what I heard one security professional call "toilet paper computing". The idea is, you create a virtual machine with your OS of choice, then "snapshot" it in a known good, properly-configured state. You then use this VM for browsing the Web or doing anything else that might expose it to compromise (i.e. get "dirty"). When you're done, you close the VM and revert it to the snapshot, thereby blowing away anything that may have happened to it during its last session (flush it away).

Laptops are vulnerable to theft and loss. Consider using disk encryption.

********

Re: the repair tech reformatting your system - in the final analysis, you need a known clean, trustworthy computer. These days malware infections are severe and infect hosts in multiple ways which can be very difficult to eradicate. It may take half a day to reformat and restore your system from scratch, but at the end of that you've got a known good system. A tech can easily spend half a day trying to clean out an infection, with no guarantee of success. And even if it *seems* clean, can you ever be really sure? Some current rootkits are low-profile and stealthy.

BTW if you did any sensitive work with your computer while it was infected e.g. access online banking, password-secured sites etc. you must assume those credentials have been compromised, and change them right away.