Barlow’s May Newsletter / Acronis UG Discount
Learning Lessons about Backups, Buy 3 Get 1 Free Special
Dear Friends,
Some of you may know that my wife and partner, Linda, has been living in Pennsylvania for six months babysitting our 2 year old granddaughter, so that our daughter could attend graduate school. I remained in Utah to run our business by myself, without Linda’s help. I came to realize what a valuable asset she was to our business. Without her, I got far behind in answering my email requests from you, our customers. She is back now and things are getting back to normal. I am caught up with any emails received in the past month or so, but still have dozens of messages sent before April, 2015. Since it is doubtful I will be able to catch up with these older messages, may I ask to resend them if you still have problems that are not resolved. I will be able to assist you now.
This crisis made us realize that we needed to streamline our business to better serve you. In the next several months we will be working on doing just that. The first change that we are announcing is a new mailing address. Please send any letters to our new address of User Group Relations, PO Box 910444, St George, UT 84791-0444. Also, with most user groups making their newsletters available on their website, we no longer request a printed copy of your newsletter. We know this is expensive. We can read your newsletter on your website instead.
May Special 2015: You can order your Acronis products from us at great discounts prices. We also provide added support you will not get from Acronis or find elsewhere. To order Acronis True Image 2015 for PC, Acronis True Image 2015 for Mac, or Acronis Disk Director 12 for PC, just go to our secure website at http://www.ugr.com and click on the product you wish to purchase. We offer single licenses at $25 and a Family Pack or Acronis Bundle with 3 licenses for just $60. With our May Special, you get a fourth license of True Image 2015 free when you order any of our 3 license bundles. When completing your order enter the order code of UGNL0515. This “Buy Three, Get One Free” May Special ends on May 31th, so order now or you will miss out on this best offer. If you have problems ordering, contact me at support@ugr.com and I will assist you.
At this time, the days are getting longer and warmer. Enjoy a delightful Spring. We truly appreciate your friendship over the years.
Gene & Linda Barlow
User Group Relations
Learning Lessons about Backups
By Gene Barlow
User Group Relations
Copyrighted May 2015
In the next couple of months, I will have completed 55 years as a computer professional. I mention this to point out that even someone with extensive computer experience can make bad mistakes and crash their computer system. A few months ago, while sorting through the hundreds of emails I get every day, I opened an attached file I had received in an email from what I thought was my local Best Buy computer store. As soon as I clicked on the attachment, I realized I had just fallen for one of the worst upsets a hacker can do to your system. Opening this bogus attachment, unleashed a malware program on my computer which completely disabled my computer. All that was left was a window that stated that my computer had just been attacked by a bad virus and that I could pay $59 to get a program that would remove this virus and fix my computer to how it was before. I knew that I was dealing with a hostage type of virus and if I had sent them the payment, I would have received nothing and they would now have my credit card information. I learned some valuable lessons from this bad situation that I want to share with you in this article.
Lesson 1 – Antimalware software does not protect your computer 100% of the time. I have installed on my computer some of the best antimalware software that constantly watches for malware that is attacking my computer. Knowing that any one antimalware product may not catch everything, I often run more than one antimalware product to get double protection. Still, even the best antimalware software cannot prevent dumb human errors, such as was my recent case. In fact, you may be only 70 to 90% protected with good antimalware software. That means that you are exposed to bad things happening 10 to 30% of the time.
Lesson 2 – Antimalware software cannot correct the problems of a malware attack. While antimalware software is pretty good at catching malware getting on your system, it is totally useless at correcting the damage caused by a malware attack. Malware software attacks your computer in very different ways. There is no way to know what mischief a malware may make on your computer. So, once the bad stuff has gotten past your malware protection, you cannot rely on it to fix the damage caused. After my system was attacked, I ran all of the antimalware programs I had to try to correct the problems. Nothing worked in fixing things.
Lesson 3 – Only a good backup can fix the problems of a malware attack. Here I stress the word – Good. Most processes that go under the name of backup are not adequate to fix your computer after a malware attack. Internet or cloud backups are only partial backups of just a few of your data files. These limited backup approaches will not be able to correct the damage of a malware attack. Those that use Clone backups end up with only one clone backup. The risk is very high in the Clone backup approach that the single clone backup you have may not restore your computer damage. The only backup approach that will save you is a full system image backup to an external hard drive. Fortunately, I practice good backups and I was able to restore my damaged system quickly without the loss of important files.
Lesson 4 – Every user needs to regularly backup their computer system. Without a frequent backup of your entire hard drive, you will not be protected from the next malware attack. This means an image backup using an excellent backup utility like Acronis True Image for PC or Mac is needed. Backing up the entire main hard drive on at least a weekly basis and storing this backup image on an external hard drive is the way to go. Save multiple weeks of backup to make sure you have more than one backup to rely on. Then you should be well protected the next time your malware system fails you.
To order Acronis True Image 2015 for PC or Mac from us, go to www.ugr.com and select the product you wish to purchase. Once you are on that product’s page, click on the appropriate Buy Now button to place your order. We charge only $25 for a single license or $60 for a three license Family Pack. That is half what this excellent product normally sells for from Acronis or from your retail computer store. When checking out of the shopping cart, enter in the special order code of UGNL0515. Not only do we provide the best prices for this excellent backup utility, we also give our customers much better support than they will get from Acronis or other distributers.
If you have questions about this article or the True Image for PC or Mac products, send an email to support@ugr.com and I will try to help you with your questions.