Recovering lost data and safeguarding sensitive content
Facilitator(s): Miguel Guhlin (@mguhlin)
Learn how you can provide your own technical support and recover lost data from your device. You will see some free or inexpensive software solutions you can put to use right away and also learn how to safeguard sensitive data just in case. It's Digital Citizenship 101.
Today's Topics
- Digital Citizenship 101
- Safeguard Your Data
- Back Up Your Data
- Recover Your Data
- Make Your Data Unrecoverable
1- Digital Citizenship 101
Digital citizenship isn't only about behaving like a good citizen online. It's also about learning how to safeguard your data and protect it against bad stuff happening to it. There are several ways that folks approach digital citizenship. Let's explore a few.
Protect
Digital rights and responsibilities: Students must understand their basic digital rights to privacy, and freedom of speech.
Digital safety and security: Digital citizens need to know how to safeguard their information by controlling privacy settings.
Digital health and wellness: Students need to make informed decisions about how to prioritize their time and activities online and off. (The Five Competencies of DigCitCommit). (Learn more)
What's the Big Takeaway?
We all need to know how to do the following:
- Safeguard our data against digital thieves with mal intent
- Back up our data
- Recover data when it's lost or accidentally deleted
- Know how to make data unrecoverable
2-Safeguard Your Data
It's not hard to safeguard your data, even when it's in plain sight. You simply need to learn to encrypt files or folders using free software. You can then put those encrypted files/folders in cloud storage, USB external hard drives for backup purposes. It all starts with secure passwords you can remember or save in a password manager.
Ready to Encrypt Your Data?
Secure Passwords Are Important
Multi-Factor Authentication
Multi-factor authentication includes at least two of the following:
Something you have — A physical item you have, such as a cell phone or a card.
Something you know — Something you know, such as a password, PIN, personal information like mother's maiden name, etc.
Something you are — Biometric data, such as fingerprint, retina scan, etc.
Secure Your digital Files with encryption
Did you know that if data is encrypted and a data breach occurs, you are not obligated to report it? This is the power of data encryption and can potentially spare you and your employer from unnecessary litigation and expense. This is known as an encryption safe harbor.
Texas defines a data breach in terms of sensitive personal information only if the data items are not encrypted (Source: Data Breach Charts, Baker-Hostetler).
The concept of “Safe Harbor” refers to specific actions that an individual or an organization can take to show a good-faith effort in complying with the law. This good-faith effort provides a “Safe Harbor” against prosecution under the law (source).
A) Text Encryption
You can use a variety of text encryption solutions. These are ideal for text/email messages you might send on your smartphone, as well as via a computer.
Tool #1: Paranoia Text Encryption
iOS | Android | Windows | Mac | Web version
Tool #2: Browser-based Text Encryption
B) File Encryption
Encrypting files with AES-256 can be done with a variety of tools. Here are a few you can use that are free. A few tools include:
7zip for Windows - This is a zip/7zip compression program that combines multiple files into one. Think of it as putting a folder of files into ONE file that is compressed for space and encrypted for security. Other, less bare-bones option include Zipware and/or PeaZIP.
Keka Zip for Macs - This is the same thing as 7zip but for Mac computers.
Paranoia's Secure Space Encryptor (SSE) - Here is (what I think) is the best cross-platform encryption tool available. It works on the most platforms (e.g. Android, Mac, Windows). One of the features is that it can take a folder of files and encrypt them all into ONE file.
FileLock.org - A browser-based solution that works well for Chromebooks. Encrypt individual files via your web browser.
3- Backup Your Data
The percentage of computer owners backing up once a day or more often is 6% in 2018,” reports BackBlaze. Other statistics from the Harris Poll, conducted each year for the last eleven years:
About People
- 20% of folks NEVER back up (31% for folks 65 and older)
- 20% of folks make backups monthly
- 25% of folks back up on annual basis
Other Stats
- 76% have deleted something by accident.
- 62% have lost data at some point.
- 51% have had an internal or external hard drive crash.
- 52% have lost access to their data.
- 61% had a security incident (with 25% of those happening within the last year).
Making backups can be hard because it requires a small level of technical expertise and it can take time. You have to first know how to back up. Check out questions to the right.
Do you use a USB flash drive?
Do you back up to the cloud? Even with plenty of cloud solutions (e.g. Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive), most don’t back up.
How do you save documents to your hard drive?
How do you secure/encrypt your data?
From ransomware to simply human error, it's easy to lose data. That's why it's important to make regular data backups. Most people don't know how, so they tend to rely on cloud storage or nothing.
One way to avoid that is to get a USB external drive (2 terabytes is plenty. USB external drives last three to five years on average, so you may want to invest in one every three years to backup your data). You can use free tools to automate backups.
Take advantage of these tools, and spend the time to learn how to backup your files.
4-Recovering Lost Data
Accidentally deleted something on Chromebook or Google Drive? Check your trash. It's going to linger for 30 days unless you empty your trash can. But what about Windows or Mac devices? Here are a few solutions you can turn to in a pinch.
This free, open source, Windows only software offers recovery of deleted information on your local storage drives. The website claims the following:
"It finds all of the deleted files on your hard drive, flash drive or SD card and allows you to recover them. Undeletion works best if performed as soon as possible after file deletion. When you delete a file, the data is not lost - but new files being written to the hard drive may overwrite your data permanently, making recovery impossible."
This Windows only software offers recovery of deleted information on your local storage drives. The website claims the following:
"Recuva recovers files from your Windows computer, recycle bin, digital camera card, or MP3 player! Recuva can recover pictures, music, documents, videos, emails or any other file type you’ve lost. And it can recover from any rewriteable media you have: memory cards, external hard drives, USB sticks and more! Unlike most file recovery tools, Recuva can recover files from damaged or newly formatted drives. Greater flexibility means greater chance of recovery."
This free, open source, Mac only software offers recovery of deleted information on your local storage drives. The website claims the following:
"EaseUS Mac Undelete is the most reliable Mac undelete software, it automatically scans your hard disk to recover deleted files in a fast and secure way. Features claimed include: Quickly & completely recover deleted, formatted, inaccessible and lost data; Recover videos, photos, music, documents, emails, archives etc. from Mac hard drives and most storage devices; Preview lets you enjoy data recovery in advance."
This Windows, Mac, Android and iOS software offers recovery of deleted information. The website claims the following:
"Recover any file or folder or reconstruct 400+ file types with multiple recovery methods. Connect your storage device & recover data in minutes. Disk Drill supports iOS and Android recovery as well." Watch video.
5-Make Your Data Unrecoverable
As nice as it is to be able to recover your lost data, there are times you want that data to be unrecoverable. To make data unrecoverable, consider using one of these free, no-cost solutions. Instead of dragging data to your trash can or recycle bin on your computer, do one of these things:
- Shred the data
- Wipe the data
How do you shred or wipe data? Use one of these no-cost tools.
WipeFile deletes files and folders secure and fast. To do this, WipeFile overwrites the information completely, so there is no way to restore the files or reconstruct the file content.
WipeFile supports 14 different wipe methods, e.g. two US Navy standards, the standard of the US Department of Defense, US Air Force and the NATO.
Freeraser, a new trash bin for your Windows desktop that lets you securely and definitively delete your private files. Freeraser has three deleting modes: Fast, Forced, and Ultimate.
These modes range from lowest to highest level of security, with each requiring a proportional amount of time.
When your computer is getting full, BleachBit quickly frees disk space. With BleachBit you can free cache, delete cookies, clear Internet history, shred temporary files, delete logs, and discard junk you didn't know was there. Designed for Linux and Windows systems, it wipes clean thousands of applications including Firefox, Adobe Flash, Google Chrome, Opera, and more.
Beyond simply deleting files, BleachBit includes advanced features such as shredding files to prevent recovery, wiping free disk space to hide traces of files deleted by other applications, and vacuuming Firefox to make it faster. Better than free, BleachBit is open source.
