March 31 marks World Backup Day! What is backup? It's a second copy of all your most important files like financial documents, family photos, videos and more. While it's best to backup your files regularly now is as good a time as ever. Here are a few more tips for digital spring cleaning! Read on.
Five easy ways to get started on digital spring cleaning:
- Be sure your software is up to date. Ignoring the latest software updates could put you at risk. Companies announce security vulnerabilities as they are discovered and quickly work to fix the vulnerabilities with software updates, also called "patches".
- Clean up and Back up. Discard unneeded files to free up storage space on your laptop, tablets and smarphones - that could also include unused apps and programs. Also, backup your files! Save photos and important documents (like copies of old tax returns) to an online location or external hard drive. Found some old treasures on your desktop? Share those photos and videos with Norton Zone safe and easy online file sharing, get 5GB free!
- Check up on your social networking privacy settings. Keep as much of your profile private as you can, and think twice before posting absolutely every aspect of your life. Social engineering is where attackers use whatever information they can glean from your public profiles – date of birth, education, interests – to try to get into your accounts on all sorts of services. Just imagine how easily someone can find out these personal details and how many services use them as security questions.
- Update your passwords and make sure each one is unique and complex, using a hard-to-guess combination of upper and lowercase letters, numbers and special characters (?,!,@).
- Run a free PC Scan. PC running slow? Constantly seeing pop-ups? Use a free tool like Norton Power Eraser to detect and remove viruses that could be causing the problem. Norton Power Eraser eleminates deeply embedded and difficult to remove crimeware that traditional virus scanning doesn't detect - so you can get your PC back.
Learn more about social networking privacy. Read: 5 Tips for Social Media Security and Privacy
Own your own business, and want to do a little digital cleanup? Read: 5 Small Business BYOD Security Tips.