The last point about backups is that you should also store a copy in another location. If your house burns down and your computer becomes a melted blob of plastic and silicon, so will your backup media. To gain the full benefit of having the backup data you should store it somewhere else so that in the event of a complete catastrophe you can restore your data instead of losing everything all at once.
The last word of advice for Lesson 10 is to create a boot disk. Again- whether through some physical or electrical glitch or as the result of some malicious virus or worm- you may lose the ability to get into your operating system. Windows offers the ability to boot into SafeMode which loads the bare minimum operating system- no programs or drivers that aren’t necessary. This might help you at least get into the system so you can work with it. Windows 2000 and XP also offer a Recovery Console which contains access to some tools and utilities you can use to try and restore your operating system to operational status.
Windows 98/Me offers a simple way to create a boot disk from the Control Panel. If you go to Add / Remove Programs and select Startup Disk it will create a bootable floppy disk which contains useful DOS utilities such as FDisk and Format. It also contains CD drivers so that you can access your CDROM drive after booting from the startup floppy as well.
The Windows 98 boot floppy will work to boot a Windows 2000 or XP system as well, but it does not have the ability to read or access NTFS drives- only FAT and FAT32. For security reasons most people use NTFS as their file system on Windows 2000 and XP. You can use a utility like the one available at NTFS.com to automatically create an NTFS-friendly boot disk, or you can follow the instructions available at ComUSolv.com to create a bootable startup floppy disk for Windows 9x/Me, NT, 2000 or XP. There are also instructions available on Microsoft’s site to help you out.
That does it. The Computer Security 101 series is now complete. Watch for more advanced lessons and lessons on more specific topics- intrusion detection, cryptography, etc.- in the future. Be sure to take the quizzes for each of the 10 lessons to see how much you’ve learned. For a true test of your Computer Security 101 knowledge watch for the Final Exam to be posted soon.