In this day of always on Internet Access, you are always vulnerable to viruses and malicious attacks. Whether the hackers are just trying to break your system or they are trying to gain access to your personal files, there is a need for protection. The protection you seek comes in many different forms.

Your first line of protection is a Firewall. This Firewall can be a piece of hardware between your home PC and your cable or DSL router or it can be some software on your PC. Of the software type, there are many different brands. Some are free and some cost money. One of my personal favorites is free for personal use and costs for business use. It is Zone Alarm. It is simple to use and can be downloaded from <here>. Another one of my favorites that costs is BlackIce. It can be bought from <here>. I won't go into the hardware side of personal firewalls because it might be too technical for some users.

Now that you have a personal firewall, you are a third of the way protected! The next line of defense is your virus scanner. Once again there are many different ones. My personal favorite for scanning viruses is McAfee. I have used it for years and have never received a virus. I can't say that McAfee is solely responsible for me never getting viruses, but it did have a large hand in it. McAfee can be purchased from just about any computer store or from their website which is <here>. McAfee also does offer a personal firewall that you can purchase. I have not used this product and cannot offer any opinions on it. Another decent virus scanner is Norton Anti Virus. It also can be bought at almost any computer store or from their web site <here>.

The third and almost most important part of protecting yourself is backing up your files. With the prices of hard drives going down, many backup mediums are also fairly cheap. You can get a 100Meg ZIP drive that works fairly nice for backing up small amounts of data. If you need more, you can buy more 100meg ZIP disks for it. If you don't want to continue to buy 100meg disks, there is a 250meg model of the ZIP drive that you can also buy more disks for. If 250meg is still too small for you, you can purchase a re-writable CD. These hold 650 - 700meg of data and can be over written up to 1000 times. If this is still not enough, there are now writable and re-writeable DVD's that can hold between 4.3gig and 9.7gig. If this still is not enough, IOMega (the makers of the ZIP drive) make a 20gig portable drive or you can purchase a second hard drive or tape drive for your backups.

Well, that is the short and dirty of protecting your files. If you have more, you can always email us and we will answer your questions the best that we can.