T'was the week before Christmas....

I frequently get questions from people who are wondering what their employer can see with respect to their computer and internet activity. The short answer? Everything.

It's chilling. You plug in an external drive into your machine and it shows as ... unformatted??? But it has all your data!!! There are things to look at, of course, but I hope you have a backup!

I'm not a parent but I hear from them frequently -- the internet is a scary place. Technology based options to keep your kids safe are limited, unfortunately.

Thanks for all the well wishes. While I'm not 100% recovered just yet (pneumonia is a slow beast, after all), I'm definitely feeling on the mend. Just in time for Christmas!

Thanks as always for being here!

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How Can an Employer Recover Information I've Erased?

I just saw this article where a company did a forensic investigation of one of their employee's computers. How do they find searches and network activity if one clears their cookies and uses CCleaner?

There's so much more to your computer, as well as your activity history, than just cookies and whatever tools like CCleaner can clean.

So much more.

I'll review a few of the more obvious ways employers can recover or collect information about your activity. Realize, though, it's not with the intent that you be able to hide what you're doing, but to illustrate the futility of even trying.

Continue Reading: How Can an Employer Recover Information I've Erased?
https://askleo.com/67556

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A Drive with All My Data is Showing as Unformatted -- What Do I Do?

I recently replaced my system hard drive and have taken my old internal hard drive out and installed it into a external enclosure. When I plug it in, it shows up on my computer, but without a file system label, only a letter designation (G). Disk management says it is unformatted. It was NTFS as an internal drive. I'm concerned that if I format it, I will lose all of my data now stored on the drive. What steps do I take to format this external drive without losing my files? Or am I missing a step in accessing the information on the drive?

First, don't format the drive.

Formatting will erase whatever's on the hard drive, or at minimum, make it extremely difficult to recover your data.

I do have some suggestions of next steps to take instead.

Continue Reading: A Drive with All My Data is Showing as Unformatted -- What Do I Do?
https://askleo.com/5001

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How Do I Keep My Kids Safe from Internet Garbage?

If you've been on the internet for any length of time, you probably feel like its main purpose is to distribute pornography, drug ads, and questionable financial solicitations. If you've got kids, you're probably also worried about pedophiles, cyber-stalkers, bullies, and other nefarious net inhabitants.

While things aren't nearly as bad as the press might make it out to be, it is bad enough.

What's a responsible parent to do?

Continue Reading: How Do I Keep My Kids Safe from Internet Garbage?
https://askleo.com/1893

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