Hello my wonderful readers–
This is just a quick note to apologize for my absence. To make a long story short, I’ve had a horrible week technologically speaking. First, I was hit with a malware/virus that slipped by my anti-virus protection, and then I was duped by a phone scammer to whom I allowed them access to my computer. I believe they wiped out part of my personal files, and added more malware to my system. My husband (we’ll call him LMSGeekDad, an e-learning developer) and I have been frantically trying to fight this viral beast and figure out how to recover my files. We’ve been at it for a day and a half, and have still not gotten my laptop back to normal. I’m actually writing this whole post on my iPhone.
So, as you can guess, I’m rather distracted from the joys of tech comm and e-learning at the moment, just trying to revive my laptop as best as we can. That’s why there’s no postings from me right now (until now), and probably won’t be until this is fixed. My laptop has my life on it; I thought I had lost a decade’s worth of family photos until I was able to find my backup on an external drive, but other important files have been affected too.
I hope to be back in the swing of things soon. Please send good karma/ thoughts/prayers this way that I can get this fixed soon, and fixed properly.
Thanks for your continued support!
Danielle M. Villegas is a technical communicator who currently employed at Cox Automotive, Inc., and freelances as her own technical communications consultancy, Dair Communications. She has worked at the International Refugee Committee, MetLife, Novo Nordisk, BASF North America, Merck, and Deloitte, with a background in content strategy, web content management, social media, project management, e-learning, and client services. Danielle is best known in the technical communications world for her blog, TechCommGeekMom.com, which has continued to flourish since it was launched during her graduate studies at NJIT in 2012. She has presented webinars and seminars for Adobe, the Society for Technical Communication (STC), the IEEE ProComm, TCUK (ISTC) and at Drexel University’s eLearning Conference. She has written articles for the STC Intercom, STC Notebook, the Content Rules blog, and The Content Wrangler as well. She was very active in the STC, as a former chapter president for the STC-Philadelphia Metro Chapter, serving and chairing on several STC Board committees, and most recently was the STC Board Vice-President before the organization closed.. You can learn more about Danielle on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/daniellemvillegas, on Twitter @techcommgeekmom, or through her blog.
All content is the owner's opinions, and does not reflect those of her employers past or present.
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TechCommGeekMom 
Hi Danielle,
I feel your pain. This happened to me (even though my life has be split between different computers) a couple of times in the past. No matter how sophisticated you or your programs are, at some point, you’re going to fall into a scam. In my case, I had a guy who entered into Ebay using my user name and purchased games online using my paypal account. Fortunately, since money was involved, I noticed the problem within hours and changed my password and cleaned my computer (I formatted the whole thing) before any more damage could be done.
I feel bad giving you any advice right now (it’s kind of walking to check a friend who broke his leg in a hospital room and telling him this is what you should have done…), but when you recover, I suggest saving your work online, at least as backup. For me, between Dropbox, Google Docs and Evernote, my work is protected there. I also run a backup (Timemachine, I have a mac) every couple of days which back ups everything on my computer to an external hard drive — which means that things that end up online first get backed up on the hard drive as well because of how these services work.
These days I’m looking for a new computer, and the last of my worries is the information on this computer. I know that most of my important work would be available to me instantly online and on my hard drive. Nothing is safe and I might lose my things as well, but at least it’s something.
All the best to you, and goodluck!
Hi Shay–
Thanks for the support. I do have some backup on an external hard drive, but I think that might be infected too. 😦 We’re just trying to work through this as best as we can. I was up until 1:00 AM working with the client company that I’m teaching to see if Plan B–using my son’s computer–would work. I had to install some software that TechCommGeekSon didn’t have, so we were up testing the connection (the client is in Asia across two time zones), and at least that worked. Now, I just have to get my presentation together in a jiffy, while LMSGeekDad and I continue to work out the kinks from my beloved laptop.
I think you make a good point about using cloud services. When this first hit, that was something that went through my head as well. I have my iDevices backed up on the cloud, but I don’t have much of my PC stuff backed up there on Dropbox or SkyDrive or other cloud accounts I have. You can bet that when this is all over, I will definitely be investing more into that and using it. In fact, even to use Plan B to teach and prepare tonight, I’ll probably have to save docs to Dropbox or Google Docs and put that on my son’s machine so I can access the docs from his machine as well as mine later. It’s a little easier than using the internal networking system in our house (yes, we have a network in our house!).
Hopefully I can write more about this experience at length later, since I have to keep plugging away at sorting things out, and hopefully my readers can benefit from my mistakes.
Thanks for your continued support!