If you have external hard drives

[Suff]

Make sure they are in a secure location and you can't knock them over.

Two of my drives, at home, were living on a shelf at shoulder level; well protected from mr clumsy. However I brought both of them with me when I came over. They are currently sitting on a coffee table around a nest of cables.

Last weekend I was disconnecting them when they both went flying. One fell on down from its side to the base and the other wound up upside down in said nest of cables.

These are pretty big drives, 14TB and prices are rocketing right now. Current replacement value is £500 to £700 depending on where you can get them from.

Worse is that they take up to 60 hours to scan. I'm still trying to find out the level of damage done. Most of it was fully backed up less than 2 months ago as I had a large revamp of my storage systems and a full resync. But you always have stuff you have created and never got around to backing up again.

Cost is one thing. Lost data is something entirely different.

This is a salutary warning we all need to remember from time to time.

[TheOstrich]

Not quite at your level, Suff, but yesterday I made a USB back-up of all my working documents - that was after reading an article about the likelihood of increasing hacking / ransomware activity by Russia .....

[Suff]

Then you disconnect the drive and pack it away carefully in a shock resistant container. Then it is safe.

Keep it connected to the PC and you stand a good chance that you lose both.

I have 3 copies of everything on separate machines, one of them turned off most of the time. The issue is always how often you update the new changes.

[Suff]

Just to be aware of the real risk right now.

Okta, a company that creates software for Identity and access management, was hacked about 3 months ago. They provide both software and identity services including single sign on from the cloud. They have 15,000 customers. It appears that the hackers gained access and did almost nothing to Okta. They used their access to gain passwords for customers. Then they ran attacks on Okta customers stealing data and threatening to release it.

It is not just your own machine you need to worry about, it is also all the companies you connect to. One of the customers of Okta is Microsoft!