One users take on Data Anchoring in FDISR

All the posts on Data anchoring have made me think about what i have been doing and why. I thought I'd share this as it might be helpful.


1) Organization. It all starts of course with the way I've organized things. I have 3 different "activities" that come into play. My business, and the fact I am treasurer for two different organizations. The main software I use is Microsoft Office 2003, Quickbooks, and Scansoft's Paperport. Also I am setup on both a desktop and Laptop with this software, so I can in less the 5 minutes transfer all work from the desktop to the laptop. Also the option in an emergency to transfer to a 3rd party machine. With all this in mind, in my My Documents area, I have a folder Backup. Under the backup folder I keep a folder of all purchased software, and a folder for each business activity. With programs like excel,word, and publisher where the location of files is optional, I keep them in the folder of the appropriate activity. Uncle Bill chose a different location for Outlook data, and I use the default. Same with Quickbooks. I do this so I don't have to try and remember what I've move and where. This makes life easier should I have to switch to a 3rd machine in an emergency.

2) Security. Acadia raised a good issue about isolation for security purposes. I have taken a different tack. My objective is to keep bad stuff off period. Aside from the firewall, I am running KAV 6.0 beta, which seems to really be doing a good job on web and mail based bad stuff. I also run Online Armor, Ghost Security Suite and System Safety Monitor to help keep me aware of what is going on. So far it has worked. For normal safe web surfing practices this has worked well. However for high risk surfing thats another matter. For example I like to surf for wallpaper images. In that case what I do is as follows. First I refresh my secondary snapshot, with FDISR and also refresh my MyDocuments backup(I keep two of them, one on each external HD) with AJC's Directory Sync. Then I boot to the secondary snapshot and do my thing. Also I have Opera set so the download's don't go into My Documents. Say when done I've downloaded 5 JPG'S. They have been scanned on download by KAV. I then doubleclick each one. All that should happen is the open in the image viewer. Should there be something malicious, even if it tries to execute a trusted program on my machine, SSM will catch it. If all is well at this point, I then use AJC Dir Sync, to try and refresh one of MyDocuments backups on one of the external drive. This will immediately highlight any file in MyDocuments that might have changed. None should have. If all is well, I move the JPG's to My Documents, boot back to the primary snapshot, and just to be safe, do another refresh of the Secondary.

3.) Why do I data anchor?

Real life example. Not to long ago all the business stuff was on the laptop, and my assistant had been here working for over an hour. My FDISR secondary snapshot had been refreshed just before shutdown the night before. But there were significant changes to several key spreadsheets, and of course much email downloaded into Outlook. The system hung and we had to power reset. System wouldn't reboot. Several efforts to reboot failed. Classic case for FDISR, but without Data Anchoring everything done that morning would be lost. Only issue at this point was Outlook, so I booted into Safe Mode, and retrieved the Outlook files from there location, and place them in My Documents, then rebooted and using FDISR, booted to my secondary snapshot. Did a refresh and booted back to Primary, retrieved and replaced the Outlook files, and was back in business. Clearly FDISR saved the day, but Data Anchoring was also instrumental.

Very wordy post, but hopefully provides a useful example of how I am addressing the issues.

Pete