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charger-batteries · 4 years ago

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How to Copy Your Windows Installation to an SSD

If you're still using a traditional, spinning hard disk on your PC, you're missing out. Swapping it out for a solid-state drive (SSD) is one of the best upgrades you can make in terms of speeding up your computer. It'll boot faster, programs will launch instantly, and games won't take so long to load anymore.

You could reinstall Windows from scratch, if you wanted to, and start new with a fresh, squeaky-clean system. While that might seem simpler, it's actually much more of a hassle. Copying your drive will get you up and running much quicker, as long as you follow these instructions.

What You'll Need: An SSD

Obviously, in order to upgrade to an SSD, you'll need to, well, buy an SSD. We have some recommendations here, though if you're on a pretty strict budget, we have a separate list of cheap SSDs as well. Make sure to buy the right form factor for your computer (some laptops will use 2.5-inch drives, while others might use M.2 or mSATA drives), and get one big enough to fit all your data. If you have a 500GB hard drive now, you should probably spring for a similarly sized SSD (or larger, to accommodate for future data).

The only exception is if you're on a desktop computer and have room for multiple hard drives. In that case, you could store Windows and your programs on the SSD while putting your music, movies, and other media on a second, larger hard disk.

What You'll Need: A USB-to-SATA Dock

During this process, you'll need both your SSD and your old hard drive connected to your computer at the same time. If you're using a laptop with only one hard drive slot, that means you'll need an external adapter, dock, or enclosure that can connect your bare SSD to your computer over USB. (Again, desktop users may not need this if they have room for two drives inside their PC—you can just install it internally alongside your old hard drive.)

What You'll Need: AOMEI Backupper for Windows

There are many different drive-cloning tools on the market, but when cloning a hard drive to SSD, I recommend AOMEI Backupper, since it's free, easy to use, and takes into account a few quirks that sometimes pop up during clones from hard drives to SSDs.

The free Standard version is fine; there's no need to upgrade to the paid version for what we're doing today. You will need to enter your email and subscribe to the newsletter to get the download link, though. Thankfully, you can just unsubscribe later.

Once you've gathered up those necessities, it's time to get started.

Back Up Your Data (and Free Up Space, if Necessary)

Before you start messing with drives and formatting partitions, it's absolutely necessary to back up your data first. A simple misclick can result in you erasing everything, so do not continue until you've backed up all of your data. If you don't have a backup yet, check out our favorite software for the job—though for today's purposes, copying your important data to an external hard drive will do in a pinch.

If you're upgrading to an SSD that's smaller than your current hard drive, you'll want to take extra care here. This isn't as common as it once was, thanks to bigger, less expensive SSDs, but if that's the case for you, you'll need to delete some files and free up space on your hard drive before cloning it. Otherwise, your data won't fit.

Once your data is safe and secure, continue onto the next step.

Plug In and Initialize Your SSD

Plug your SSD into the SATA-to-USB adapter, then plug that into your computer. If it's a brand-new drive, you probably won't see the drive pop up in File Explorer, but don't worry; it just needs to be initialized first. Open the Start menu and type "partitions" in the search box. Click the "Create and format hard disk partitions" option, and Disk Management will open. It'll prompt you to initialize the drive using either the GPT or MBR partition table.

I'll be using GPT for my SSD, since I have a modern PC with a UEFI firmware. If you have an older PC with a traditional BIOS, you may need to use an MBR partition table. If you aren't sure, look up your specific model of PC or motherboard to see which type of firmware it uses.

If you aren't prompted to initialize the drive, and don't see it in Disk Management, double-check that it's properly connected to your computer, and that the enclosure or dock is powered on (if necessary).

Once the drive has been initialized, you should see the drive show up in the bottom pane of Disk Management as unallocated space. Right-click on it, choose New Simple Volume, and click Next through the wizard to create a new volume taking up the entire drive. It isn't super important what this volume looks like; we just need a volume on the disk for AOMEI to see it. Close Disk Management and continue to the next step.

Clone Your Hard Drive

Open AOMEI Backupper and click the Clone option in the left sidebar. Choose Disk Clone, and select your C: drive as your source disk. Click Next, then click on your SSD to select it as the destination disk—again, be very careful you're selecting the right disk here, since it will be erased and overwritten—and click Next again.

Even if your SSD is smaller than your current hard drive, AOMEI will resize the volume to fit. You shouldn't run into trouble unless your source drive contains more data than can fit on the new SSD.

Finally, you'll be given a summary of the upcoming operation, which you can double-check one last time. Check the SSD Alignment box along the bottom, which ensures you're getting the best performance from your SSD, and click the Start Clone button.

Wait...and Wait, and Wait

This can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours, depending on how large the disks are. So go binge-watch some Netflix and come back in a while. When it’s done, click the "Finish" button. You should see your new SSD in File Explorer, complete with all your data.

For Bigger Drives: Extend Your Partition

If your SSD is the same size or smaller than your old hard drive, you should be all done with the cloning process, and you can skip to the next step.

If, however, you upgraded to an SSD with more space than your old drive, you'll need to do one more thing. The Windows volume you copied to your SSD will be the same size as it was on the original hard drive, and you'll need to expand it so it takes up the rest of the disk. The Pro version of Backupper allows you to do this during the clone process, but there's no need to pay—another AOMEI tool called Partition Assistant can do it for free.

Install the free, Standard edition of Partition Assistant and look at the disks along the bottom of the window. You should see that one of your drives—in my case, Disk 2 holding the D: drive—has a bunch of unallocated space at the end. That's our new SSD, and the D: drive (or whatever letter its assigned on your system) is the volume we want to expand. You may see other volumes on the disk—these are boot and recovery partitions, and it's best to leave them intact for now.

Click that volume and select the Merge Partitions button in the sidebar. Check the Unallocated box alongside that D: drive and click OK. You should see the new layout in the AOMEI Partition Assistant window, and you can click the Apply button in the upper-left corner to make the changes.

Install Your SSD

Next, shut down your computer. It's time to install that SSD in your computer permanently. If you have a laptop with only one hard drive slot, you'll need to remove your old hard drive and replace it with your SSD. This is a bit different on every laptop. If you have a desktop PC with more than one hard drive slot, you can leave your old hard drive in as extra storage, and just install your SSD alongside it.

Reboot From Your New Drive

Once you're finished installing the SSD, you'll need to tell your computer to boot from it. (This may not be necessary on laptops with just one drive, but if you experience problems booting, it can help on some PCs.) Turn your computer on and enter its BIOS/UEFI setup—this is a bit different on every PC, but it'll usually say something like "Press DEL to enter setup" on the boot screen, so you'll want to press the corresponding key as it starts up.

From there, look for your BIOS' boot options. These will be in a different spot depending on your computer, but once you find them, you'll want to select the option to change the boot sequence. Choose your SSD from the list as the first boot drive, then head back to the BIOS' main menu to exit, saving your settings.

Your computer will reboot, and if all went well, it should plop you back into Windows faster than ever before. Open File Explorer and check to confirm that your SSD is, in fact, the C: drive. If everything looks good, you're ready to rock, and your computer should feel significantly snappier without having to reinstall a thing.

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shatteredskies042 · 6 years ago

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NaNo Day 23

Ally watched him carefully, a longing in her eyes and emotions Michael could not decipher as he got comfortable in the chair. “What’s wrong?” Michael asked, meeting her gaze and furrowing a brow in confusion.

“Nothing,” the blonde said quickly, tearing her eyes away and looking at the fire. “Nobody has sat in that chair for sixty years. Since I put these chairs in,” she told him, glancing back at the soldier with a gentle smile.

“It’s a comfortable seat,” Michael promised, taking the final sip from his lemonade mixture. “This library is huge,” he noted.

“It’s the third largest surviving supernatural library in the world,” Ally said proudly, watching him. “The next is under New York, the largest is a magical academy in France,” she explained as she looked at him. “Those have more modern texts and are constantly updated,” the angel added. “This library stopped being regularly restocked when the Huntsmen collapsed, and while I’ve got some newer books, the majority was written up to and before 1942.”

“What happened to them?” Michael asked, “and what exactly were the Huntsmen? You mentioned they were a peacekeeping force.”

“They kept the supernatural world hidden and enforced the laws. Huntsmen were feared for their abilities and respected for them. There were Institutes all over Europe and North America. They were incredibly skilled fighters, magic users, sometimes they operated in teams, but for the most part they worked alone. The War led them to their downfall,” Ally remembered sadly as she looked at the fire. “They were straining to keep everything hidden, and communications between the ones trapped on the European continent were cut off from those in Russia, Britain, and the U.S. only made matters worse. The breaking point, or what everyone calls it, was when the Berlin Institute was bombed. The leadership there believed it was the work of the other Institutes, as their importance really wasn’t known to the allies. They struck back at the London Institute, and the infighting tore them apart,” Ally shook her head sadly.

“How many total are there?” he asked, listening to the tragedy intently.

“Well, here,” she waved to the building around them. “Outside New York City, London, Paris, Berlin, one to the south of Moscow, and there’s one in Rome. Most of them are hotels now, still focused on the supernatural,” she stated. “There’s a bunch of crazy rumors about a few other Institutes, like one in the West or one up in Alaska.”

“How did they keep the peace?” Michael wondered next.

“But sort of doing what we just did,” Ally said, “responding to conflicts and mediating. If somebody had to be hunted down, send a Huntsman. They solved the supernatural world’s problems, until they fell apart.”

“But if, like you said, the European Institutes were at war with each other, what about the New York one? Or Goddess Island?”

“They saw and heard what happened, and realized just how corrupt and flawed their system was as the world came apart around them. While the European Huntsmen died with bangs, the American Huntsmen just sort of faded away. I cleaned my fair share of skeletons out of this place,” Ally told him. “For the most part, they faded into society, some of them did their jobs as Huntsmen until their deaths, but the prestige of the profession was tarnished.”

Michael nodded slowly in understanding as he looked at her, then looked at the flickering fire. He listened to it crackle softly, and looked at the window at the brightness outside. It had felt like an entire day had passed already, but the sunlight would linger for a few hours still. He still had the Talon drive to decrypt, and now the Ivory Tower were worth looking into as well. “I think I’m going to head into town for a little bit,” he told the blonde.

“Want to pick up dinner while you’re there?” The angel asked with a raised eyebrow and a smile tugging at the corner of pink lips.

“Just tell me where to go,” he offered with a smile.

“I’ll text you, you still have the phone I gave you?” she asked.

“Yeah, thanks for reminding me,” he said, “is it secure? I don’t trust phones,” Michael admitted.

“These are pulled carefully and overwritten for members of the supernatural community,” Ally promised. “Don’t ask me how to explain how it works, but they essentially operate on another network and are scrambled so they’re hard to intercept. Unless of course the baddies get ahold of your phone,” she noted.

“Unlikely,” Michael promised, then rose from his chair, “see you in a bit with dinner,” he promised as he headed for the door. Michael did not know it, but Ally craned her head to watch him go, before staring at the chair he had sat in with a gentle smile, before returning to reading the old book.

Michael headed for his car and headed into town, referencing his shopping list from earlier where he needed to get more clothes and mundane things like a toothbrush. He could order some things online, more tactically focused gear, or just have Allyson order it for him. He found his way to a grocery store in the midst of town, wandering inside and taking a look around. Michael decided to take his cart and walk the aisles, searching meticulously for both things he needed and wanted along the way.

Years of training with the best special operators in the world, and I’m putting some of that to use shopping, he smiled to himself and laughed. His cart grew as he wandered upon things to store in the kitchen of the Institute, things he could cook with. As a guilty pleasure, he bought large bags of candy peppermints and sugared candy orange slices, knowing a good snack now and then would be a benefit. He finally found the health and self-care aisles, and picked up many of the things he needed. A toothbrush and paste, as well as shampoo and soap, and he felt that he had picked up what he needed.

Michael survived through the checkout process and carried the bags out to his car and secured them in the trunk. Next, he headed for a strip mall he had spotted near Scarlet’s coffee place. There were a few small clothing stores and a thrift store, only a handful of the former seemed like they would have clothing for him. Clothes shopping had never been his strong suit, but he needed to find things to wear: Things functional enough to pack his carry gear and low profile kit, but inconspicuous enough to blend in. The Grey Man look, they had a wardrobe of inconspicuous clothing and accessories back at their base in Hereford and Germany when he had been with Task Force BLACK. They had used them during low profile surveillance operations, or covert missions in urban spaces.

Even though he wasn’t going to be kidnapping important targets, or smashing a cyberwarfare den, being able to become a grey man and disappearing was an important equipment option he wanted to have.

He only found a handful of things in both stores, neutrally colored and generic clothing, just enough to blend in. He had tried on the new clothing in a fitting room with his handgun and magazines strapped to his body and rejected anything that printed at any point during his quick testing.

After loading the bags into his car, he felt his phone buzz. He had not remembered actually getting Ally’s name or phone number from her, but both and a picture were already present on his phone. She had sent him a number of pictures, captures of a menu. He sat in the driver’s seat of his Camaro and went over the information for a Chinese place in town. It was a good choice, he thought, his mind instantly going back to stakeouts and surveillance missions with BLACK. They had to eat, and as a joke they would usually get takeout from a Chinese place. They were almost ubiquitous, and rarely posed a health threat to the team the same way Mexican food or a greasy burger would.

He responded with what he wanted, and the blonde promised she would let him know when it was ready.

Michael smiled a bit, then looked at the thrift store. He had to give it a try, he decided after a moment of thinking. Maybe he would find something good there, if not, it killed more time until their takeout was ready. The inside was well lit, and something caught his eye almost as soon as he found his way to the clothing section: a flat black leather jacket. Pulling it off the hangar, he tried it on and stretched, moving to see if the leather would make any noise. It failed to, and Michael noted that the measurements were very similar to the semi-covert tactical jackets he had been issued in BLACK. With some minor modifications, he could easily conceal a pair of magazines in the jacket itself, and have plenty of pockets and storage space for equipment. Instantly enamored by the garment, Michael took it off and headed for the checkout counter, paying for it without much bartering and returning to his silver car.

There was also the possibility of reinforcing it, he thought. Like the gear he had previously, a thin layer of Kevlar Diamond Weave could be added to the interior, giving some ballistic protection. Maybe Ally knew a vendor or someone trustworthy to do it. He could hardly wear a ballistic vest or plates around everywhere he went, and with the possibility of both Talon goons and Ivory Tower operators out there gunning for him, he needed all the protection he could get.

As the sun’s light faded from the sky, Michael drove around, familiarizing himself with the town and the territory. Once Ally told him their food was ready, he drove to the address provided and headed inside, waiting in a short line until he was directed to the pick up counter.

In and out was fairly quick, and he walked out with two bags of pungent Chinese food. He returned to the island, and found Allyson standing in the garage when he backed in. “Welcome back,” she greeted with a smile as he got out of the car.

“Hey,” he replied. “The food is in the passenger seat, I bought some stuff I have to bring in, too,” he admitted as he crossed over the trunk.

“Catch,” Ally bid as she tossed him a small black box. “Garage door opener,” she explained as she claimed the two bags of Chinese food. “I’ll put these in the kitchen and then come back and help you with the groceries,” she promised before disappearing into the Institute.

Michael leaned into the open passenger door and mounted the device Ally had given him to the visor on the driver’s side, then retreated to get the groceries from the trunk. It took the two of them a pair of trips each, and once they were done Michael stored the refrigerated goods before doing anything else. Once that was taken care of, he joined Ally at the table and took arrayed his meal around his eating space while the blonde chewed on a piece of pork.

“You bought clothes too?” she asked, looking up at him while he opened the white containers and looked at his meal. He speared a piece of orange chicken with his fork and took a bite before he responded.

“Most of the clothes I got from my storage unit were a bit small,” he told her. “They still fit me, of course, but I can’t easily conceal a weapon while wearing them.”

Ally nodded affirmatively, “I see,” a smile curled at her sauce stained lips before she ran over them with a napkin. “You’re not going to be bringing diva levels of clothing with you on our missions, right?” she teased.

“Only diva levels of equipment,” he promised with a returned smile. They ate in a comfortable silence, and afterwards Michael thanked the blonde for dinner.

“Don’t worry,” she responded with a sly smile, “pay me back by cooking breakfast in the morning,” the told him.

Word Count: 45626

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itbeatsbookmarks · 7 years ago

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(Via: Hacker News)

Damn Cool Algorithms: Log structured storage

Posted by Nick Johnson | Filed under tech, damn-cool-algorithms

Typically, if you're designing a storage system - such as a filesystem, or a database - one of your major concerns is how to store the data on disk. You have to take care of allocating space for the objects to be stored, as well as storing the indexing data; you have to worry about what happens when you want to extend an existing object (eg, appending to a file), and you have to take care of fragmentation, which happens when old objects are deleted, and new ones take their place. All of this adds up to a lot of complexity, and the solutions are often buggy or inefficient.

Log structured storage is a technique that takes care of all of these issues. It originated as Log Structured File Systems in the 1980s, but more recently it's seeing increasing use as a way to structure storage in database engines. In its original filesystem application, it suffers from some shortcomings that have precluded widespread adoption, but as we'll see, these are less of an issue for database engines, and Log Structured storage brings additional advantages for a database engine over and above easier storage management.

The basic organization of a log structured storage system is, as the name implies, a log - that is, an append-only sequence of data entries. Whenever you have new data to write, instead of finding a location for it on disk, you simply append it to the end of the log. Indexing the data is accomplished by treating the metadata the same way: Metadata updates are also appended to the log. This may seem inefficient, but disk-based index structures such as B-Trees are typically very broad, so the number of index nodes we need to update with each write is generally very small. Let's look at a simple example. We'll start off with a log containing only a single item of data, and an index node that references it:

So far so good. Now, suppose we want to add a second element. We append the new element to the end of the log, then we update the index entry, and append the updated version of that to the log, too:

The original index entry (A) is still in the logfile, but it's no longer used: It's been replaced by the new entry, A', which refers to the original, unmodified copy of Foo, as well as the new entry, Bar. When something wants to read our filesystem, it finds the root node of the index, and uses it as it would in any other system using disk-based indexing.

Finding the root of the index warrants a quick aside. The naive approach would simply be to look at the last block in the log, since the last thing we write is always the root of the index. However, this isn't ideal, as it's possible that at the time you try to read the index, another process is halfway through appending to the log. We can avoid this by having a single block - say, at the start of the logfile - that contains a pointer to the current root node. Whenever we update the log, we rewrite this first entry to ensure it points to the new root node. For brevity, we haven't shown this in the diagrams.

Next, let's examine what happens when we update an element. Say we modify Foo:

We started by writing an entirely new copy of Foo to the end of the log. Then, we again updated the index nodes (only A' in this example) and wrote them to the end of the log as well. Once again, the old copy of Foo remains in the log; it's just no longer referenced by the updated index.

You've probably realised that this system isn't sustainable indefinitely. At some point, we are going to run out of storage space, with all this old data sitting around taking up space. In a filesystem, this is dealt with by treating the disk as a circular buffer, and overwriting old log data. When this happens, data that is still valid simply gets appended to the log again as if it was freshly written, which frees up the old copy to be overwritten.

In a regular filesystem, this is where one of the shortcomings I mentioned earlier rears its ugly head. As the disk gets fuller, the filesystem needs to spend more and more of its time doing garbage collection, and writing data back to the head of the log. By the time you reach 80% full, your filesystem practically grinds to a halt.

If you're using log structured storage for a database engine, however, this isn't a problem! We're implementing this on top of a regular filesystem, so we can make use of it to make our life easier. If we split the database into multiple fixed-length chunks, then when we need to reclaim some space, we can pick a chunk, rewrite any still active data, and delete the chunk. The first segment in our example above is beginning to look a bit sparse, so let's do that:

All we did here was to take the existing copy of 'Bar' and write it to the end of the log, followed by the updated index node(s), as described above. Now that we've done that, the first log segment is entirely empty, and can be deleted.

This approach has several advantages over the filesystem's approach. For a start, we're not restricted to deleting the oldest segment first: If an intermediate segment is nearly empty, we can choose to garbage collect that, instead. This is particularly useful for databases that have some data that stays around for an extended time, and some data that gets overwritten repeatedly: We don't want to waste too much time rewriting the same unmodified data. We also have some more flexibility about when to garbage collect: we can usually wait until a segment is mostly obsolete before garbage collecting it, further minimising the amount of extra work we have to do.

The advantages of this approach for a database don't end there, though. In order to maintain transactional consistency, databases typically use a "Write Ahead Log", or WAL. When a database wants to persist a transaction to disk, it first writes all the changes to the WAL, flushes those to disk, then updates the actual database files. This allows it to recover from a crash by 'replaying the changes recorded in the WAL. If we use log structured storage, however, the Write Ahead Log is the database file, so we only need to write data once. In a recovery situation, we simply open the database, start at the last recorded index header, and search forward linearly, reconstructing any missing index updates from the data as we go.

Taking advantage of our recovery scheme from above, we can further optimise our writes, too. Instead of writing the updated index nodes with every write, we can cache them in memory, and only write them out to disk periodically. Our recovery mechanism will take care of reconstructing things in a crash, as long as we provide it some way to distinguish completed transactions from incomplete ones.

Backups are also easier with this approach: We can continuously, incrementally back up our database by copying each new log segment to backup media as it is completed. To restore, we just run the recovery process again.

One final major advantage to this system relates to concurrency and transactional semantics in databases. In order to provide transactional consistency, most databases use complex systems of locks to control which processes can update data at what times. Depending on the level of consistency required, this can involve readers taking out locks to make sure data is not modified while they are reading it, as well as writers locking data for write, and can cause significant performance degradation even with relatively low write rates, if enough concurrent reads are occurring.

We can beat this with Multiversion Concurrency Control, or MVCC. Whenever a node wants to read from the database, it looks up the current root index node, and uses that node for the remainder of its transaction. Because existing data is never modified in a log-based storage system, the process now has a snapshot of the database at the time it grabbed the handle: Nothing a concurrent transaction can do will affect its view of the database. Just like that, we have lock-free reads!

When it comes to writing data back, we can make use of Optimistic concurrency. In a typical read-modify-write cycle, we first perform our read operations, as described above. Then, to write our changes, we take the write lock for the database, and verify that none of the data we read in the first phase has been modified. We can do this quickly, by looking at the index, and checking if the address for the data we care about is the same as when we last looked. If it's the same, no writes have occurred, and we can proceed with modifying it ourselves. If it's different, a conflicting transaction occurred, and we simply roll back and start again with the read phase.

With me singing its praises so loudly, you may be wondering what systems already use this algorithm. There are surprisingly few that I'm aware of, but here's a few notable ones:

Although the original Berkeley DB uses a fairly standard architecture, the Java port, BDB-JE uses all of the components we just described.

CouchDB uses the system just described, except that instead of dividing logs into segments and garbage collecting them, it rewrites its entire database when enough stale data accumulates.

PostgreSQL uses MVCC, and its writeahead logs are structured so as to permit the incremental backup approach we described.

The App Engine datastore is based on Bigtable, which takes a different approach to on-disk storage, but the transactional layer uses optimistic concurrency.

If you know of other database systems that use the ideas detailed in this post, let us know in the comments!

14 December, 2009

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repwincoml4a0a5 · 8 years ago

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Smart devices, stupid mistakes — how to make sure you’re really wiping all that sensitive data

(BigStock Photo)

The past few years have been big for the Internet of Things (IoT), and the future of the connected device industry looks even brighter. Research firm IHS forecasts that the IoT market will grow to 30.7 billion active devices by 2020 and 75.4 billion by 2025. As we continue to witness this tangible shift toward IoT devices, previously futuristic ideas are coming to life all around us and changing the way we experience the world. And while these digital luxuries provide new levels of convenience, the security concerns of connected devices have been well documented. But, what happens when you decide to sell, re-gift, or otherwise dispose of these IoT products? How can you be sure you’re not leaving traces of personal data for the next owner to access.

In this article, I’m going to outline various tips for securely removing your personal information and data, and general security best practices for connected devices. So, let’s start with some of the more obvious scenarios and work our way through other IoT technology.

Computers, Tablets, and Phones Apple Photo)

You’ve decided it’s time to call it a day on your laptop, tablet or smartphone, in favor of an upgrade. What now? First, be sure to backup all your data before firing up that Craigslist ad and making the switch. Cloud accounts make it easy to access your files across a range of devices, and online services for tablets and smartphones will often automatically sync personal data. You should already be saving contingency versions of your important files on a regular basis (for a variety of reasons), but be sure you have backup copies of anything you want to transfer over before getting rid of that old device.

Next, wipe all the data and potentially sensitive settings from your computer’s hard drive, or your tablet or smartphone. There are two things you should consider to securely wipe your devices. First, your files and contact lists aren’t the only things to worry about. Your device likely has many settings that connect to cloud services or might expose things about you to potential new owners. You need to be sure to reset all your device’s settings, too. Second, just “deleting” something from computer storage may not totally remove it. Without going into the specifics, when you delete files or format your hard drive, your computer (or mobile phone) just “forgets” how to find those files; it doesn’t necessarily overwrite them. There are several forensic and recovery tools that can find and restore that data if it hasn’t been overwritten. Securely wiping data may involve overwriting files at least a few times.

The process for securely wiping a device depends on the device itself. Luckily, many phones and tablets are easier to wipe, since some mobile operating systems (OSes) have features built in to handle it for you. For instance, the settings menu on iOS devices allows you to go to General => Reset => Erase All Content and Settings to get rid of all your sensitive data. This feature will either destroy the encryption keys your phone used to secure your data, making that data totally inaccessible, or older iOS versions overwrite that data a few times. It also removes the phone from your iCloud account and Find My Phone. In short, it’s a simple one-button method to security wipe iOS devices.

Android devices can be a bit harder to wipe since there are many variants of this OS, all of which may act differently. Most versions of Android should have a “Factory Data Reset” option. However, in the past researchers found that this was not a secure wipe. Since it didn’t overwrite data on the device, attackers with the right software could recover that data. If you want to really destroy the data on your Android device, it’s best you encrypt it first. Once you encrypt the device and then factory reset, new owners won’t have the keys necessary to read your data.

Finally, for good old-fashioned laptops and desktops, the key is to make sure you overwrite data on your hard drive with a special secure wipe tool. There are many tools out there, including free Windows options like Eraser, that help you make sure data you delete is gone forever. Also note, you may have to follow a different process to securely wipe SSD drives, but there are many instruction guides online.

Although wiping your personal computer, tablet or smartphone is a fairly obvious tip, it’s incredibly important that you take the time to do it properly. Failing to completely reset your old devices can leave your personal data at risk of being discovered by the next user.

Smart Cars

The automotive industry is becoming more advanced and modern cars now come off the assembly line with Bluetooth hands-free calling, GPS navigation systems, even Wi-Fi. The convenience of having easy access to your phone book, locational data, and favorite apps while behind the wheel is almost too good to turn down. The problem is that as our cars become increasingly sophisticated, they store more of our personal data, just like a PC or smartphone would.

(BigStock Photo).

One step you might forget in all the excitement of selling your old car is removing all that personal information. In fact, I just purchased a used car and found several names and phone numbers archived from the previous owner’s contacts. When the time comes to sell your connected car, be sure to clear all login, contact, and personal data from the settings. If you forget this step, you could be gift wrapping access to your social media accounts, contact list, home address and more for the car’s new owner. Some dealers may be starting to take this into account themselves, but in my case, I did find the previous owners’ stored Bluetooth devices.

As an aside, leaving data behind in rental cars’ Bluetooth systems is another common mistake (as if the rental car process wasn’t enough of a hassle by itself). Whether you’re on a business trip or taking a vacation, if you sync your address book and other data to a rental vehicle, be sure to clear saved numbers, calls and other information before returning it.

By the way, we’ve been talking about this problem in the perspective of the seller avoiding leaving sensitive information for the buyer. However, this issue can also pose risk to buyers, so they can benefit from resetting smart cars. too. Recently, an IBM X-force researcher found that he could still access the car he sold in the car’s app. While the car’s local settings had been cleared, the manufacturer’s cloud had not been. This meant the old owner could still unlock doors, and gain access to the new owner’s car.

Gaming Consoles Xbox One S. (Xbox Photo)

Let’s say you can’t wait to trade in that old Xbox 360 for an Xbox One. Through the years, gaming consoles have become one of the hardest types of devices to attack. This is largely due to increasingly hardened security through hardware and software updates designed to prevent piracy. But don’t be fooled. Although they might be some of the most secure IoT devices on the market, the fact that they’ve evolved to become your one-stop-shop for entertainment means gaming products now save valuable data to their hard drives and SD cards – just like personal computers.

So when it comes time to sell your old console, the main issues are deactivating your online accounts (PlayStation Network, Xbox Live, etc.), and deleting the data on the console. The account deactivation is a basic step, but one many forget. In one case, I bought a used PS3 that still had the previous owner’s PlayStation Network (PSN) account intact. If I hadn’t deactivated the account myself, I could’ve continued buying games with his credentials. You can easily find instructions for deactivating different consoles’ accounts online.

The console will also have menu options to reset them, or delete data. Again, like computers, sometimes a delete isn’t really a complete delete. However, modern consoles, like the new PlayStation offer both a quick and full delete. Be sure to use the full option for a secure wipe.

It’s understandable to be excited to play ‘Halo Wars’ on Xbox One, but make sure you don’t forget to securely wipe your old console before selling it. Mistakes like that can give the next owner access to your personal images, videos, credit card information and even browsing history. That could be game over.

Smart Home Devices

If you’re moving out of your home, consider what connected devices – and data – you might be leaving behind. Some home purchase agreements include caveats that allow the new homeowner to inherit IoT products installed by the previous owner. The procedure for removing your personal data from smart home products like the Nest Thermostat is relatively simple but can be easily forgotten through the moving process. Nest and other smart home products enable you to remove the device from your online account and reset the product, itself, to factory defaults. This should effectively cleanse the device of your information, leaving it ready and waiting for the new user to setup their own account.

Amazon Echo and Google Nest are two examples of smart home devices. (Image via Nest)

Forgetting to wipe the connected home devices you leave behind can leave remnants of your personal information for the home’s new owner to find. Chances are, they’re not secretly a black hat with malicious intent – but unprotected data is still a chilling proposition nonetheless.

Nest products – and other IoT devices in general – have been scrutinized over privacy concerns. While they’re designed to analyze and learn your preferences, they also accumulate usage data and other information that gets sent back to a service provider. But, that’s a whole other ball of wax.

Smart Printers, Copiers, and Other Office Devices (HP Photo)

Smart office devices are exposed to some pretty critical information. Whether it’s a smart copier or digital printer, we’ve heard concerns for years that these devices can save information they encounter. So, when you’re getting rid of that home office printer/copier, how can you be sure that you’re not tossing out years of information for someone else to recover? First, find out if your office device has built-in storage. If it doesn’t, then there’s a good chance none of your information has been saved to the machine. If your printer or copier does include a cache of local data, you can often remove the storage devices, and wipe it in the same way you wipe normal computer storage.

It’s worth noting that some businesses do elect to always remove storage devices from any computing device they sell or recycle. Besides securely erasing this data yourself, you can also give these storage devices to data destruction services, which may even go as far as physically destroying the storage device.

Some higher-end printers include email functionality that allows them to send files via email directly from the printer controls. In order to protect your email address and any others that might be stored on a smart printer, be sure to wipe this data before selling or disposing of it. Most printer manufacturers should have menu options to do so.

Wearables (FitBit Photo)

Smart watches and other wearables like fitness and health trackers have, and will continue to become more engrained in our everyday lives. As a matter of fact, research firm IDC predicts that by 2019, more than 89 million smart wearable units will ship worldwide. That’s a lot of FitBits, Pebbles, Microsoft Bands and Apple Watches!

A recent study by HP Fortify found that many smart watches contain significant vulnerabilities related to privacy, insecure firmware, authentication, and encryption. The study examined ten popular smart watches and found that 90 percent of the time data flowing to and from the watches was easily intercepted.

That said, the bulk of this information storage is somewhere else (in the cloud). While attackers might intercept it in transit, these small, typically resource-light devices don’t tend to store much data locally. If you’re planning to sell or give away any kind of connected wearable device, you do need to make sure it’s factory reset, so that it can no longer connect to its associated cloud account. You probably won’t have to go to much trouble to wipe any local data on these wearables (that said, this will differ from device to device).

General Security Tips for IoT Devices

By their very nature, IoT devices are quite diverse, and thus expose us to a variety of attack profiles. The devices I’m most concerned with today are those that have quickly embedded traditionally known operating systems into non-traditional computing devices without taking security into account. For example, think of a refrigerator, DVR or webcam that’s running a Linux operating system. Since attackers are already familiar with Linux, hacking these types of devices is easy for them. Worse yet, the manufacturers making these devices seem to be years behind in security hardening and development. Furthermore, since these devices are basically just computers, they often have storage full of sensitive information.

The issue of IoT device security has gained a great deal of attention due to the widespread effects of recent Mirai botnet attacks. My hope is that we’ll see more connected device manufacturers incorporate security into their products – from research and development to completion – in the near future.

As far as what you can do to protect your data on an IoT device you sell, I’ll leave you with three important strategies:

Make sure your data is securely wiped from the device. If you’re using a type of IoT device that has a hard drive or local storage, it probably has some data that you need to delete before reselling. However, you need to remember that with computers, not all deletes wipe equally. Do a little research to see if your device’s “factory reset” is a secure wipe or not. If it isn’t, you might have to find alternate means to really kill your data.

Don’t forget the device’s settings. When we think of protecting our data, we normally worry about erasing the sensitive files we might have on a device. However, we can’t forget that many of the settings in an IoT device link to our private data, too. These devices are connected to our cloud and social network accounts, they have a memory of all the access points we’ve connected to, they know your email address, and much more. Make sure you also erase all the device’s settings and deactivate the device from any cloud accounts it might be linked to.

Don’t forget the settings in the cloud, too. Learn from what the X-force researcher discovered about his smart car. Even if you wipe all a device’s local settings, sometimes manufacturers might design features that allow cloud accounts to always have access to the device, unless the account itself gets deactivated and reset. If you can manage a device with a mobile app, be sure that you don’t still have access to the device after factory resetting it.

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exfrenchdorsl4p0a1 · 8 years ago

Text

Smart devices, stupid mistakes — how to make sure you’re really wiping all that sensitive data

(BigStock Photo)

Computers, Tablets, and Phones Apple Photo)

Smart Cars

(BigStock Photo).

Gaming Consoles Xbox One S. (Xbox Photo)

Smart Home Devices

Amazon Echo and Google Nest are two examples of smart home devices. (Image via Nest)

Smart Printers, Copiers, and Other Office Devices (HP Photo)

Wearables (FitBit Photo)

General Security Tips for IoT Devices

As far as what you can do to protect your data on an IoT device you sell, I’ll leave you with three important strategies:

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2kXyWoj

#DIYS

0 notes

repwinpril9y0a1 · 8 years ago

Text

Smart devices, stupid mistakes — how to make sure you’re really wiping all that sensitive data

(BigStock Photo)

Computers, Tablets, and Phones Apple Photo)

Smart Cars

(BigStock Photo).

Gaming Consoles Xbox One S. (Xbox Photo)

Smart Home Devices

Amazon Echo and Google Nest are two examples of smart home devices. (Image via Nest)

Smart Printers, Copiers, and Other Office Devices (HP Photo)

Wearables (FitBit Photo)

General Security Tips for IoT Devices

As far as what you can do to protect your data on an IoT device you sell, I’ll leave you with three important strategies:

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2kXyWoj

#DIYS

0 notes