What are your Tech New Year’s Resolutions?

It’s 2020 and with the New Year, comes a new you! A chance to turn the page and starting bettering your life with changes, even small ones to make every day better. Many people start the year out by deciding on some New Years Resolutions but can you make it last?

Start with something small that you can do every day, something that only take two minutes.

Something like making sure your work or personal files are backed up each night or better yet, set up a automatic back-up that you check on just before going to bed. If you’re a Windows user, you can also set up OneDrive to automatically sync your User folders (Desktop, Documents, Pictures, Videos) to your OneDrive Personal or Business Cloud storage. If you’re a Mac user, you can turn on iCloud Drive, which syncs Desktop and Downloads and a list of other apps to your iCloud Storage.

Your device or its hard drive in particular can fail on you at any time, especially with these hot summer days here in Australia. Google has 15GB free storage for all your Google Apps. If you intend to use it for storage, create a separate storage account to your Gmail account as the 15GB includes your mail storage. If you have an Office 365 account for business, personal, or your family, you have access to 1TB of storage per user, 6TB total for multi-user accounts. Take the time to back up those family photos, precious mementos and digital copies of all of your important documents in case they are lost or damaged. We especially encourage the back-up of files for those in the areas currently effected by bush fires or are in their path.

Remember, Cloud storage compliments, but is not a substite for backups, and we also recommend backing up your cloud storage with a 3rd party cloud backup service.

You can never have too many backups!

Do something that you only need to do once.

Something like enlisting a password manager that have Multi Factor Authentication and a password generator. Take 45min to an hour out of your day off and go through all of your online accounts and reset their password to have something unique. A Password Manager like LastPass is handy for this. It has browser extensions and mobile apps so that you can easily access any passwords for log-in but also has the ability to recognise URLs and Apps and pre-fill the data for you. You will then only have to remember one password to rule them all. Our tip is to make it a memorable phrase or sentence, that means something to you and is easy to remember.

And remember, for any cloud subscription, if it offers 2-Factor or Multi-Factor Authentication, always enable it! That especially includes your password manager.

Put steps in motion to protect you for the future

Something like having a look over your devices security and storage reliability. Make sure the security program you installed is still making regular scans and removing all threats it finds. Is the subscription still active? Is there potentially a cheaper option out there that is still just as good? Infinite Edge recommends Webroot as this is the anti-virus/security software we install on our clients machines.

Let us know what your New Years Resolutions are, will you add any of the above?

Stay safe and stay cool!