NetEqualizer News Blog

By Art Reisman

About six months ago, I was trying to access a web site when I got the infamous message: “Your Flash Player is out-of-date”.  I was provided with a link to a site to update my Adobe Flash Player.  At the time, I thought nothing of updating my Flash Player, as this had happened perhaps 100 times already. That begs the question as to why my perfectly fine and happy Adobe Flash Player constantly needs to be updated?  Another story for another day.

In my haste, I clicked the link and promptly received the Adobe Flash update for my Mac and installed it. For all intents and purposes, that was the end of my Mac.  This thing just took it over, destroying it.  It would insidiously let me get started with my daily work and then within a few minutes I would receive a barrage of almost constant messages popping up telling me I had a virus and to call some number for help.  Classic Ransomware.  At the time I did not think Macs were vulnerable to this type of thing, as the only viruses I had contracted prior were on my Windows machines, which I tossed in the scrap pile several years ago for that very reason.

My solution to this dilemma was simply to re-load my Mac from scratch.  I was up and running again in about one hour.   A hassle yes, the end of the world – no.

Now you might be wondering what about all my data programs and files I store on my Mac?  And to that I answer what data files?  Everything I do is in the Cloud, nothing is stored on my Mac, as I believe that there is no reason to store anything locally.

Gmail, Quickbooks, WordPress, photos, documents, and everything else that I use are all stored in the Cloud!

For backup purposes, I periodically e-mail a list of all my important Cloud links to myself.  Since they are stored in Gmail, they are always accessible and I can access them from any computer.  Data recovery amounts to nothing more than finding my most recent backup list e-mail and clicking on my Cloud links as needed.