
Antivirus, Backups, and ONESOURCE Trust & Estate Administration Programs
As you may have read recently, there are a lot of viruses going around that are infecting world-wide companies and home users' computers causing issues.
ONESOURCE Trust & Estate Administration understands that it is necessary, for overarching security, to keep an Anti-virus application installed. However, the presence of the Anti-virus application is not a 100% deterrent to infections. Some virus infections rely upon "user intervention" in order to gain access to your computer.
Please exercise caution when opening emails from senders that you don't recognize.
Please also exercise caution when opening attachments (that you may or may not have requested) from senders that you DO recognize.
One recent widespread virus infection, known as "Cryptolocker", is a good example of a virus with extremely bad effects. It utilizes emails sent from "known senders" to trick the recipient into opening the attachment, thereby loading the virus onto your computer.
This virus then causes all common document and data files on your computer to be encrypted - and even those that you have access to on the network - and tells you that you "need to pay $300 or more dollars" to regain access to your files.
The only recommended way to retrieve them is to restore them from a known good backup.
This brings up the second point.The ONESOURCE Trust & Estate Administration programs do NOT have a built-in capability for backing up data created by the programs.
While we do offer the Archive Manager utility for download, this utility is NOT intended to be used as a backup application, but for file portability and temporary archiving of data.
It is highly recommended that users of the ONESOURCE Trust & Estate Administration software (and ideally, of any software) have some sort of regularly scheduled backup to storage media or external services.
In our dealings with firms over the last 15 plus years, we've discovered a whole range of backup systems in place. We've also discovered some firms have no regular backup procedures, or (almost as bad) procedures that don't work or aren't followed.
As an example, our office utilizes a two-step backup process.
Monday through Thursday, on a daily basis, all files that have changed on the network are backed up to a "Weekly" backup tape.
On Friday, a new "Weekend" tape is used to back up the entire contents of the network.
All tapes are stored off-site for up to 4 weeks.
Every 4th week, the tapes are shipped to another location (again, off-site storage) and a second set of tapes is used for the next 4 weeks.
Once the second set of 4 weeks elapses, the original set of tapes is sent back to our office, and the second set is sent away.
The act of shipping off-site ensures data safety (primarily protection from catastrophic events) and allows us to keep approximately 60 days of backups quickly available.
Additionally, "test restorations" are done every 60 days to ensure the viability of the backup.
ONESOURCE Trust & Estate Administration understands the work that goes into utilizing our applications and in the industry for which we develop software. We want you to be safe and know that your data will be recoverable in the event of a catastrophic occurrence.