Security For The Small Business Computer's Data

Back up everything on DVD. An external DVD burner can be had for around $100, stores over 4GB's of data and makes excellent long-term backups. You should store your DVD backups at a separate location than your computer because if a catastrophe happens, you can quickly be back in business.

Stick to a regular backup strategy. Data is more expensive and time consuming to replace than hardware. But running backups eats up a lot of time, requires you to feed CD's or DVD to a drive and then you have to remember to do the actual backup, right?

Short-term backups can easily be automated if you have Windows XP installed on your computer. For under $100, you can purchase an external drive and use XP's Scheduled Tasks control panel to periodically copy valuable data to your external drive.

In fact, if your external hard drive is large enough, you can set up seven backup directories (1 through 7) and schedule a daily task which first copies directory 6 to 7, 5 to 6 and so on and then copies all your valuable files to backup directory 1.

Now you have a week of backups easily accessible via your external drive and you never have to remember to start a backup. If your drive is large enough, you can continue the process and copy the first 7 backups to another 7 directories and keep 14 backups, two weeks worth, easily at hand.

Don't keep your critical information on a laptop. Laptops can easily be stolen and are often targeted for theft especially at airports and restaurants. If you travel with your laptop, keep only those files you absolutely need at any time on your laptop, or, better yet, burn the files you need on a CD or DVD and carry that disc separately from your laptop.

Another alternative is a notebook hard drive caddy. A caddy allows you to easily remove the hard drive of your laptop and carry it separately from the laptop itself. This way, if your laptop is stolen, none of your data is stolen with it. Laptop hard drive caddies can be purchased from vendors such as XtraDisk and cost a little over $50 for most laptop models.

Protect data with passwords. You can often set a "BIOS password" which will lock out unauthorized users from even booting your computer. Be advised that if a data thief has time to remove the cover of your PC or laptop, they can reset the CMOS - a battery backed up memory chip - on your motherboard and disable the password.

If you're going to be away from the office for a while and are concerned about your employees getting access to sensitive files, WinZip is a shareware utility that allows you to archive files and password protect the archive. WinZip does allow users to see file names without asking for a password, so if you want to keep the names of files secure as well create an archive within an archive and password both.

Pick hard to guess but easy to remember passwords. Hackers use dictionary tools to guess passwords so any word in the dictionary is not secure. A safer bet is to choose a phrase meaningful only to you and replace "O" (oh) with "0" (zero), "L" with "1", "too" and "to" with "2", "E" with "3", "for" with "4" and so on.

If password protecting all your files into archives seems a little onerous for you, you might be thinking that there has to be a better way, and there is. It may sound like science fiction, but several vendors now produce fingerprint scanners that are not much larger, or more expensive, than a top end computer mouse.

Microsoft, IBM, Sony and American Power Conversion all make fingerprint based password management devices, most of which are able to protect individual files as well as associate a fingerprint with the passwords for your favorite email program or web site. You can even register several fingers as insurance against minor injuries that might temporarily alter the print of a single finger.