Ask Leo! #590 – Security, Skepticism, Backing Up, and more…

Well it finally happened Leo, after decades of computing on too many pc's and laptops to count, I experienced a HD crash. This was my first foray into SSD's (a Samsung 850 EVO 250 gB). Only 1 year old and working fine the day before, turned PC off and no boot the next morning. No recovery/repair tool would see the disc. If it had not been for reading your newsletters over the years I would have been in big trouble. Needless to had I had a backup! I purchased and installed a replacement, booted the previously created Windows Repair disc and successfully restored an only 2 week old Windows 7 backup image - yay! Thanks Leo for the constant preaching on having a backup!!

While security questions do represent a weakness, it's a relatively minor weakness, IMO. Security questions nowadays are used only really used to authenticate password reset requests, with the reset links being then sent via email or text. Consequently, so long as the accounts/devices to which the reset links are properly secured - in other words, protected by a strong password - it doesn't matter too much whether or not somebody knows or can guess the answer to a security question.

That's kind of my point - systems are moving away from security questions. They're rarely used - as you say only in account recovery. Even then many systems no longer use them at all. I believe that's because they were not secure enough in practice.

Hi Leo, I am currently doing a chkdsk /f /r :C Since my brand new laptop is somehow having 100% disc usage, it's a Dell Inspiron 15 5559 i7 1 TB memory, 16gb ram (idk if any of that helps). I actually was experiencing the same problem of 100% disk usage with the a laptop I bought last week, so i exchanged that for a new one, thinking maybe that specific one had a problem. I'm yet again experiencing the same disk usage problem, and just like with the last laptop this one has its scan stuck at 10%. I called Dell support when I was having problems with the last laptop and they figured the hardware is ok and that Windows 10 was installed incorrectly and I need a clean install. Well know that I'm having the same exact problem I was wondering what you thought about this problem of disk usage, and if I should wait out this scan or stop it now.

CHKDSK won't fix disk usage issues. I'd have you find out what's taking up all that space: Where's my disk space going?