How to effectively protect your computer?

In the twenties and the thirties IBM was one of the first companies which started making computers, not the ones with which you are familiar with today, but electro-mechanical machines which could compute and calculate additions, subtractions, divisions and multiplications mechanically and give you the correct results. These were called the “Unified Record machines” that could handle only on a piece of data at a time. Since then,  a huge revolution has taken place in the field of Information Technology and computers have undergone incredible changes.

The hardware of the computer has passed through different phases of development called generations starting from electronic valves to transistors to Integrated circuits to microprocessors. The microprocessors have become more and more powerful with the result that the size of the computer has become smaller from the huge size of rows and rows of cabinets to a desktop version which we call a PC or Personal Computer now. In other words,  the so-called “Computing Power”, which had been, the sole property of large corporations has been relegated to ordinary people. CISC and RISC servers were introduced to handle the work allocated by terminals which allowed people to access the main computer through terminals.

Then came the LAN and the Internet, which radically changed, the world of computing and Information Technology. You had the hardware but what was the thing that could make use of this hardware? Initially the instructions to do the mathematical calculations were given to the “Unit Record” machines by wiring a “Control Panel”. The first computer in the real sense started using a set of instructions to make the computer carry out complex mathematical calculations by inserting these instructions into the memory of the computer and by executing them from there.

This set of instructions or executable programs were very specific to the machine and the manufacturer. The set of instructions helped the hardware to perform specific functions. When the hard disk was discovered it was initially used to store data only. But it was soon discovered that the necessity of loading the various instruction sets every time the computer had to do a particular job was no longer needed. Now the various instruction sets could be clubbed together and could now be stored in the disk along with the data.

The combination of instruction sets came to be known as the Operating System and could be invoked whenever the computer was powered on. The Operating System could provide the particular instruction set to handle a particular job when it was called to do so. The first PC, which arrived on the scene, had an instruction set called DOS. As this operating system was disk based, it was called Disk Operating System. There have been various versions of the DOS which were used to operate the PC through time the latest one being Windows and Linux.

The Windows Operating System could handle a single task invoked by a single user only. The requirement to save time became so great that an Operating System had to be designed which could handle multiple tasks initiated by multiple users. The UNIX Operating System was born. Each manufacture wanted to be one up on others and to get a greater market share started designing their hardware in such a way that a typical UNIX Operating System only would work on their machine. This started the race for supremacy of different UNIX Operating Systems like the XENIX, SCO UNIX, Mac OS, HP-UX, IRIX and SOLARIS Operating Systems which were nothing but different flavors of the same UNIX Operating System.

People soon got disgusted by hegemony adopted by the various manufacturers who wanted to dictate terms by developing their own hardware and their own Operating Systems. The users wanted an Operating system with a source code that would be open to everybody for development and the incorporation of new ideas to make it more powerful. This problem was solved by a gentleman named Linus Torvalds who came out with an open source UNIX Operating System called LINUX in 1991. The popularity of this Operating System was so great that then hegemony created by the different vendors came to an end and the manufactures started adopting this Operating System for their hardware. Operating Systems like SOLARIS and IRIX later became open source Operating Systems due to the demand from the users.

But what happened to the requirement for software packages that could be used for running on top of these Operating Systems in order to take care of specific commercial requirements? The development went on to produce programs which could be used to handle commercial and scientific applications which started to be called “Languages”. COBOL, ALGOL and FORTRAN, were some of the programs which were developed in the early history of Information Technology. Just like the Operating system these languages were developed using special instruction sets or codes.

Later on these same programs were written in more advance software languages like Visual Basic, C, Visual C, C++ and others. The Operating Systems also started to be written in same languages with the result that it is hard to differentiate between the codes of an Operating System and the code developed for  software for a commercial job. But the spread of the knowledge of the Operating System and its code made it vulnerable to people who harbored ulterior motives, which was previously not there as the manufactures guarded their trade secrets very efficiently.

It all started with two people who wanted to annoy others just for fun. They started writing small programs, which could be, attached to the Operating System to create mischief. They did not realize at that time that they were giving birth to a menace that would envelop the world of Information Technology in such a disastrous fashion that there will not be any relief in sight from it for years to come. The “computer virus” was born and soon took the world by storm. The facility provided by the Internet made all computers around the world highly vulnerable to this threat, and soon companies were sent scrambling to find out a solution to stop this threat.

The Windows Operating System had become very popular with the PCs used by individuals, and most of them had this Operating System loaded in their desktop PCs. Initially the virus used to get loaded onto the unknown machine to the user when he downloaded something through the internet, and he will suddenly find that his PC had hung up. Or while working on some word document file he would see the letters falling off one by one to the bottom of the screen. He might find that he is unable to access some file while other data files have gone missing.

The original “computer virus” has gone from strength to strength as more and more people are getting involved in using their brains to develop more powerful computer viruses either to get sadistic pleasure or to fulfill more diabolical intentions. Hacking into other computers has been made into an art and just to prove that they are more intelligent than others people are misusing their god-gifted intelligence to prey on another innocent individual.

Whatever may be the problem caused by the virus you will have to call a customer support engineer to fix it. The customer support engineer may suggest the formatting of the disk to flush out the virus and reload the operating system. But what would happen to the important data contained in the hard disk of the computer? They would be lost for all eternity by formatting the disk, and you would be in a real soup. Company operations will go haywire because of this lost data and even an individual user like you would find it very difficult to get all your lost data.

This is the scenario when an Antivirus, a Backup and Recovery software will come to help to pull the affected computer and your credibility out of the morass of despair it has sunk in. The companies like Avast, AVG, Kaspersky, McAfee, BitDefender, Norton are trying very hard   to come up with anti-virus solutions, which can keep, both your computer and data safe but the war against the computer virus has only just begun. These companies are spending the night and day to give the ordinary users a shield against these computer viruses, but the see-saw battles are sometimes being won and sometimes being lost.

The biggest hurdle, which is faced, by these companies, is that you cannot predict beforehand about what a computer virus is going to hit the market next. But the people developing these computer viruses are even more ingenious and keep on creating some virus which cannot be stopped by any antivirus software available in the market. Even highly secure Government Computers systems handling very confidential and important data are getting compromised by the power of these computer viruses.

This brings us to the fact that most of the time the developers of computer viruses are one step ahead of the creators of antivirus software. So what will you do when one fine morning you find your computer with its precious data has gone on the blink? You have no other option but to re-format your disk, re-load the Operating System and hope for the best that you can get back the precious data which you have lost. In this case, the first question that you will be asked is whether you have a backup of your files or not.

Most of the time people do not feel the importance of keeping any backup of their files, which leads to their ultimate downfall. The importance of keeping a backup comes to the fore only when a system crash occurs and you have to format your hard disk. You can reload the data from the backup tape or backup disk, and your computer is up and running as if nothing had happened.  To reload the data onto the hard disk, you need  software for restoring the lost data in the system to its original state.

This particular problem is taken care of by the products like Paragon Hard Disk Manager 12 Suite, Acronis True Image 2014, NovaBackup 14 Professional and others which have the capability to copy an image of the hard disk and restore the data as it was before the disk crash occurred due to virus attack. Taking a backup is not the end of the story at all. The backups were initially on magnetic tapes and restored to the system hard disk when required. CDs and DVS can also be used to take backups.

As the restore operation may be required much later than when the backup was taken, sometimes the backup tapes would fail to restore the system properly.  The backup started to be taken on hard disks so that the problem of restoration could be avoided totally. The hard disk for taking the backup would be on another computer connected to the internet and the restoration of the system hard disk could be performed through the internet successfully. The concept of cloud computing has completely changed the way backup is taken nowadays, and it is not a problem anymore.

But here is the catch. What happens to the data which comes into an online server in a continuous stream? The antivirus software can stop the Operating System of your computer from getting corrupted. The Backup and Recovery software can get your computer up and running in the eventuality that the Operating System does get corrupted by the virus if the anti-virus software fails. But the data, which the online computer, are unable to handle in the period when the Operating System and the data are being reloaded is lost forever.

To avoid this loss from occurring the concept of the Disaster Recovery site has been developed. This employs two computers connected via the internet and located far away from each other in which the data is updated at the same time. Backup and Recovery software take the backup of any one of the computers daily. Not a single bit of data is lost when the computer at the Disaster Recovery site is asked to restore the lost data to the original computer and the business can run as usual. The recovery software is able to load the same data that was lost in the instant the main computer doing all the work went down.