How to back-up and synchronize contents of an important folder?

Several reasons could lead to massive data loss on your hard drive. It could be failure of your storage device, a virus attack or could be a hacker. To keep your critical data from an accidental loss you need to have a good back up strategy in place. There are several tools for automated back-up of data and one such simple, tiny, freeware program is Mirror that can duplicate a folder structure to a new location.

Mirror is extremely small in size (88Kb) and requires no formal installation. As it back-up file using multi threading, it requires only a few system resources; only files and folders are copied, so disk writes are held to a minimum with the result being a much faster backup compared to traditional methods.

Mirror is compatible with any hard drive or removable media that your operating system (Windows all) supports such as USB sticks, Removable Hard Drives, Zip Drives, MP3 Players and CDRW.

Using this utility is very simple. Run the tool and select a target location (destination folder), then select source folder (the folder and its contents to mirror). If you select Synchronize Target, items not found in the source folder will be deleted in the target folder. After configuring the tool, minimize it to system tray, it will back-up anything from the source folder.

As mentioned, the program is free and clean (check it here) and works with all versions of Windows.

Hard disk monitoring tool O&O DriveLED 2

There are plenty of tools available for monitoring the health of a hard disk. O&ODriveLED2 is one of the best in this category and carries out a continuous health check of the hard disk and warns the user, if there is any possible potential problem. You can then secure your data in order to avoid a fatal loss either by making a back up of the system or by replacing the affected hard disk drives. So, this program plays a vital role in protecting data and making sure it is accessible long-term.

Status of your hard disks can be seeing by small indicator lights in the control panel of the program. Depending on the status of the hard disk, it changes its color; Blue – no activity to report, Green – read access on the partition, Red – data is being written onto the partition, Yellow – data is being written onto the partition and read access on the partition has been reported.

O&ODriveLED2 uses S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) for analyzing the hard disk and warns you of potential problems that may arise. All modern hard drives with SMART are capable of running self tests. You can perform a self test by a mouse click with this tool.

After installation, in the Control panel right click on ‘Hard disk’ icon and select SMART, then select ‘Start detailed SMART test’. After the self test, if no errors are found, the respective categories will be lit up green. If errors occur, they will be reported; more details available with the associated help file.

If you like this tool, you can now register for a free license key. Visit this address: www.oo-software.com/home/en/special/driveled/ and register your name and address. You will get an email that includes your free key and download link. Use your key and email for downloading the product. After installation activates it according to the email you just got.

How to make a self-bootable clone of your Windows operating system?

Making a back-up of your Windows operating system is always useful in order to restore it, if, for example, there is a Windows crashes due to a virus attack or a hard disk failure. There are several tools like Norton Ghost for creating exact clone of your hard disk, but costlier, here is a freeware program that makes a self-bootable clone of a hard disk in a user friendly interface that’s very quickly.

XXClone is a good freeware program that duplicates the Windows system volume and makes the target volume self-bootable very quickly and easily. This program supports FAT16, FAT32, and NTFS partitions of Microsoft Windows NT4, 2000 and XP and supports internal disks -IDE, SATA, and SCSI as well as removable disks such as USB, Firewire, etc.

Moreover, the source and the target volume need not be of the same file system. That is you may copy a FAT volume into NTFS volume and vice versa and still make the target volume self-bootable.

The program is simple to use and is suitable for novice and experts alike. It does the operation in Windows interface; most of the other similar programs require a DOS interface. The Freeware does not support any of the incremental backup options. Every clone operation will be a fresh, full backup that takes a long time. You can download the program from www.xxclone.com

Free Internet Window Washer

In order to keep your privacy you might want to erase all your internet traces, computer activities and programs history from your computer. Of course Windows have built-in functions for erasing all such leftovers, but most of the tracks can not be erased with them, anyone else can see what you have been doing on your computer. Here is a freeware program ‘Free Internet Window Washer’ that securely erases all tracks with a single click.

Free Internet Window Washer is free internet tracks eraser and privacy cleaner software. This tool allows you to erase Window's temp folders, run history, search history, open/save history, recent documents, your browser's cache, cookies, history, visited URLs, typed URLs, auto complete memory, index.dat files, and much more with a single click. The program can also set to ‘auto wash’ mode from the option menu.

Moreover, much of your activity information takes up valuable disk space, and recovering this space can be very beneficial. You can also easily erase the tracks of up to 100 popular applications.

Internet Explorer proxy changer

A Proxy Server is always useful in order to hide our identity by hiding our IP address (anonymous) and increase the network speed by saving information and files that are requested by many other proxy users in a special database (not all proxy) and can help to surf a site in cases there are some restriction on it from certain countries, geographic regions or on some IP address.

Changing proxy server (enabling or disabling) in Internet Explorer is not as easy as in Firefox (at least for me), especially if you want to test different proxies to see which one works. IE Proxy changer will help you in this context.

After installation, just minimizes to the system tray where you are only a right-click away from changing the setting; enables or disables the proxy, set it to a default setting or an alternate setting.

Remember you may need to restart IE when you change the proxy for the change to take effect. The program is clean and requires the .NET Framework from Microsoft to run.

How to block advertisement from web page in Chrome, Opera, Safari and Firefox?

Too many advertisements on a website often annoying us; it takes longer to load the site, makes difficulty in finding the original contents and the annoying pop-up window always a problem. To get rid of these problems, here is a tiny add-on, AdSweep for Google Chrome, Opera, Safari and Firefox 3 that hides advertisements from the web pages you visit.

AdSweep is a content-filtering add-on like Adblock and lets you prevent page elements, such as advertisements, from being displayed. In technical terms, according to the site ‘AdSweep is a user javascript that defines CSS rules based on the web site you are visiting to hide elements of the page that show advertisements’.

To download and installation instruction on different browsers, visit at www.adsweep.org.

How do I protect my computer from the Conficker worm?

Conficker (a.k.a Downup, Downadup, Kido) is a computer worm that infects all Window operating systems (Windows 2000 – Windows 7 beta) by exploiting vulnerability in the Windows server service. First appeared in October 2008, this worm spread itself to other computers across a network, through file sharing and also via removable drives. Preventing this worm is usually bit complicated because of its advanced malware techniques.

The article ‘Protect yourself from the Conficker computer worm’ published by Microsoft gives practical information about how this worm enter into a computer? What does the Conficker worm do? And how do we remove this worm?

Security researchers have discovered certain variants of Conficker worms (a, b, c, d) to date and as I said above these are spread through file sharing, removable devices (Conficker B) and via built-in peer-to-peer (P2P) communication (Conficker D). The Conficker worm can also disable important services on your computer such as Windows security updates.

Is my computer infected by Conficker? If you have updated your Windows and security programs, you are at a much lower risk of being infected by the Conficker worm. Most of the antivirus software developers have already developed standalone tools for scanning and removing Conficker worm. Some of them are following: Conficker Remover from ESET, Kaspersky, F-Secure, Microsoft, Bitdefender and McAfee Stinger