Why is backup first? My recommendation for just about everything.
Hi, everyone. Leo Notenboom here for
askleo.com
Here's an example question I got some years ago
actually. "In your response on to the Specter and Meltdown
vulnerabilities, the first thing you recommended was to back up.
Why? How does that relate to anything?
How does backing up help protect me from vulnerabilities?"
I admit I harp on backing up a lot.
It's on purpose.
It is one of those things.
It's one of those simple things.
Once you've got it under your belt
that can protect you from so many different things. Why do I harp on it?
Because so many different things can go wrong.
So I want to be clear about the kind
of backup I'm talking about when I say backup.
Yes, it's good to back up your data, copy files from here to there, or whatever.
The backup I'm specifically talking about
right now is what I call a complete system image back up.
It is an image, a picture,
a copy of everything on your hard disk, all the partitions, all the software,
Windows, your installed applications, the data that you've created everything.
The best way to think of it is that an image backup is what you would use
if your hard drive failed and you had to replace it with an empty hard drive.
You would basically take the most recent image backup.
Since it's got everything,
you would simply be able to restore everything to the replacement hard drive.
And, in fact, hard drive failure is one
of the many things that can possibly go wrong, often without warning.
Now, when it comes to malicious software and risks of things like vulnerabilities
in your system, the important thing to realize is
that well, to put it bluntly, vulnerabilities make you vulnerable.
Things can happen.
Malware can attach itself to your machine through a variety of different ways,
be it opening attachments or a vulnerability on the network side or any
number of different things that you may or may not be aware of, and more importantly,
things that you may or may not notice as they happen until it's too late.
Nothing can protect you like a backup.
One of the easiest ways to remove malware from your machine is to restore your
machine to an image backup that had been taken prior to the malware's arrival.
That way, you know that the malware is
gone because it was never there in the first place.
There are no other ways that will give you
that kind of guarantee short of reinstalling your system from scratch.
Now, the specter and meltdown
vulnerabilities that were referenced in the original question.
As I said, this goes back a couple
of years were essentially readonly vulnerabilities.
What they did is they allowed malicious
software to look at things they weren't supposed to look at.
And on the surface,
you would think that a readonly vulnerability wouldn't be that big a deal.
I mean, yeah, they'd be able to read some data.
Big deal. Well, it is a big deal.
It can be a big deal because the data that they could be reading could be this
data that allows them to get into the rest of your system and start writing.
For example, Windows does not do this.
But, for example, consider if Windows stored your
administrative password in plain text again, it doesn't.
But if it did, then the malicious software read-only software could read the password,
use the password, and suddenly give itself administrative privileges.
Now, Windows doesn't do that, right?
That's not how Windows stores passwords,
but Vulnerabilities can have that same effect where reading the right kind
of information using that information in some way could then allow the malicious
software to get what's called a privileged escalation.
In other words,
it could become administrator even though it's not supposed to be able to.
And then that readonly vulnerability
became a gateway to a read write vulnerability that then allowed
the malicious software to do whatever the heck it wanted to do.
And of course, the other one.
The other scenario that actually people
seem to be more concerned about than malware.
For a variety of reasons.
I'm more concerned about malware than I am about this particular scenario.
But the bottom line is that yes, occasionally updates cause problems.
Once again, if you've got a backup taken immediately
prior to the update and the update causes you a problem,
you restore to the backup and the update is gone.
You then do whatever it takes to either
get a different update or delay the update until it's fixed or something.
But it allows you to not be afraid
of updates because, you know you have your backup as a safety net.
99 point 99 percent of the time updates are not
only important, but they're just going to work fine.
They really do work.
I've never personally in the five or six years now that I've been using
Windows Ten, I certainly hear about update failures, but I've never experienced
an update failure, and I've taken all the updates.
I'm an update first, ask questions later kind of guy.
I've never had a problem.
Not that kind of problem, but I've always had the backup to save me.
If I did, that is what allows me to feel confident and safe taking updates.
That is why I want you to have that back up in place so that you don't have that as
an excuse to not take the updates because you want the security updates.
You want these updates to make your system
less vulnerable to the malicious software that's out there.
The other scenario that I mentioned from time to time is if you're making some
legitimate change to your machine, you're doing something to it.
Maybe you're installing Windows Eleven,
maybe you're installing some massive piece of software.
Maybe you're doing just something to your machine.
If you take an image backup prior to whatever it is you're doing,
essentially, you've created a point
in time that you can't get any worse than right?
You've got a snapshot of your machine at a point in time, no matter what happens.
Next, if it gets worse, if Windows Eleven doesn't work,
if whatever you did just blew up your machine,
if something went wrong with whatever happens next,
you just go back to that image backup, and you know that that's the point that's
a safety net that you can always return to.
No matter what happens from that point
forward, it can't get any worse because you can always go back.
There's nothing that can protect you from so many different things.
Like a well executed, properly implemented backup.
Please do that.
It's always going to be part of my answer to just about everything.
When I'm going to ask you to do something
to your machine, and honestly, you should already be doing it to protect
you from all of those many, many things that might go wrong.
I hope that's helpful hope that gives you
an answer as to why I keep relying on backups.
So much for updates for related links for comments and more, visit
askleo.com/33048. I'm Leo Notenboom, and this is
askleo.com