Tips on hard drives and protecting them with 2FA
Q. I’m a not-too-tech-savvy senior who wants to buy a simple, easy-to-operate external hard drive for my Windows laptop. What should I be looking for?
A. These days, external hard drives are all relatively easy to use and the costs have come way down.
You can easily find something that has abundant storage and won’t break the bank.
If you’re planning to use the external drive to back up your computer, a good rule of thumb is to buy a hard drive with twoto three-times the storage on your computer hard drive.
That means that if you have a 1-terabyte system drive, get a 2- to 3-terabyte external drive.
This will give you plenty of room for backups, especially if you use a system that performs incremental backups. Many good backup solutions will keep a running history of your files so that you can recover file versions from various dates and times in the past.
When selecting a hard drive, go with the big names like Seagate, Western Digital, Samsung, etc. They are basically the same. Check the online reviews to see what people are saying about any given make or model.
Once you have the drive, decide how you want to use it. Windows and Macs have native backup tools that work well.
Q. I’ve been hearing a lot about something called twofactor authentication. What is this, exactly?
A. Whenever you sign into an online account, you are usually just presented with a login screen that asks you for
your user name and password. When you enter that information, the site gives you access.
That works pretty well, but if someone gets your password then they can log into your account as well.
Two factor authentication, also known as 2FA, adds an extra step to the login process.
If you enable 2FA, you will sign in like you always do, but the site will then have a second step before you are granted access.
The most common form sends a text message to your phone with a code you must enter to complete the sign in process.
This means that even if someone had your password, they would not be able to access your account unless they also had your phone. This helps ensure that the person logging in is the owner of the account.
Other forms of 2FA involve using an app like DUO or Google Authenticator which generate codes to perform the second login step or a hardware device like a YubiKey. These are a bit more complex, but they offer greater levels of security.
You can read more about
2FA at the How To Geek article “What Is Two-Factor Authentication, and Why Do I Need It?” at tinyurl.com/helpline2fa