The Guest account is disabled by default, but also has a blank password by default. It is possible for hackers and malicious code to sometimes enable the Guest account after they have compromised your machine through other methods. If they have managed to gain administrative privileges they can also add the Guest account to the Administrators group to grant it elevated permissions as well. With no password assigned an enabled Guest account will grant essentially anyone access.
To add a layer of protection you should assign a strong password to the Guest account- something of 7 or more characters, preferably containing a variety of upper and lower case letters, numbers and special characters (for example the % or & symbols). You should not use your name, your dog’s name, your child’s birthdate or any other easily attainable information. In fact, the less “sense” it makes the harder it will be for anyone to guess. For more information about password security see the article Password Security. Even with a strong password in place, you should leave the Guest account disabled unless you have a specific reason to enable it.
No matter how well you maintain your system- defragging the hard drive, deleting temporary files, etc; and no matter how well you protect your system- antivirus software, firewall, etc.- it may one day simply crash. Either through physical mechanical defect or through a virus or hacker deleting or compromising data you could lose everything you have on your hard drive.
For many people this would include a lot of personal information. In this age of digital photography losing your hard drive can be the equivalent of losing all of your photo albums in a house fire or flood. You might have important documents, financial data, catalogs of audio files and other important and impossible, or at least difficult, to duplicate data.
For these reasons it is very important that you back up your data on a regular basis. The frequency you choose to back up can vary depending on the frequency your data changes. If you only add new important documents every 6 months or so, or you only update your financial data once a month, it probably isn’t necessary to perform a backup every week. You should choose a frequency that works for you and set some sort of reminder for yourself to make sure it gets done. You should also do a backup immediately after adding any critical or sensitive data.
