I know I have talked a lot about passwords in the past, but I just had an incident with a new customer that really drives the point home on making sure you know what accounts you have and how to get into them. Not knowing what accounts you have could be devastating to your business.
Let me start at the beginning. A friend recommended that someone call me when they could not get their email working. No problem usually. I get a lot of calls like this. The difference this time was that his computer had also quit working, and his hard drive was encrypted so I could not even get to his information. This was going to take some detective work.
The first thing I did was replace his hard drive to get his computer working again. We saved the old drive in case we could at some point get into his Microsoft account to get the encryption key to access this drive. He wasn’t sure if he had a Microsoft account. He had always had people help him with his technology and he didn’t pay attention to the information. He wasn’t even sure who helped him with his email and accounts involving this type of stuff.
Once we had his computer running again, we attempted to login to any accounts using the email addresses he knew about. He did have his phone, so we hoped to be able to authenticate these accounts using his phone. We found two personal Gmail accounts and we thought we were well on our way.
Using the Gmail accounts we attempted to log into his business email account. We were unsuccessful at this. We finally figured out that he had set up his domain at GoDaddy, so we reached out to them and using his phone number we were able to get into his account, but it did not have any email accounts listed, just the domain. I will also mention this took us a few days for GoDaddy to give us access to this account.
At this point we tried to just set up his email using GoDaddy, but they informed us that he already had email set up with Microsoft and we needed to contact them to either use the one set up there or have them release our domain so we could set up his email at GoDaddy. We elevated the support, but they kept saying they could not do anything, and we needed to contact Microsoft.
With the help of GoDaddy, we finally found a phone number for Microsoft and actually talked to a person. They helped us set up a ticket for the Microsoft system and we thought we were finally moving forward. They told us this will take a few more days and they would email or call us. This actually took more than a week and when we finally heard from them, they told us they could only help us if we were the global administrator on the account. I gave them every email address he could remember but they said none of those were the global admin.
It turns out the global admin was someone from a company that helped him set this up years ago and he was not sure of the company name. He is currently going through old receipts trying to find this company that he isn’t sure of the name. This has gone on for more than a month and his business is suffering due to this. In addition, I have spent many hours working on this, so he is also racking up a bill with me.
Why am I telling you this? This is a worst-case scenario of not having all of the information for your accounts. If someone sets up your domain, email and website make sure you know how to access all of these accounts. Hopefully your relationship with the company that sets everything up will stay intact but sometimes companies close down, and people move away. It is also helpful to know what email account is connected to your Office365 account.
These are probably the most popular accounts, but this goes for any software on your computer. If you don’t know how to access your accounts, you can end up losing a lot when disaster strikes. If you are not sure about your accounts, I can help you get control over them. It is much easier when you have a working connection to those accounts. If you wait until your computer crashes this becomes much more difficult.
The person listed above thinks this might cause him to shut down his business. I don’t want this to happen to anybody. If you have accounts out there and you are not sure how to access them, let me know and I can help. It is best to attempt this before your computer breaks or your previous vendors disappear.
Yes, February 10th was National Clean Out your Computer Day. I know most of you probably have not celebrated this day before and are probably wondering why I even mentioned it. This just gives me an excuse to take you through some very important computer maintenance issues that usually get overlooked and can make a big difference for your computer.
So how do you celebrate this day?
The first thing is to get rid of unnecessary files that are on your computer. The files I am referring to are the temp files that are created when updates happen. There are tools built into both PCs and Macs that will remove these files, but I like to use a program called CCleaner (ccleaner.com) to do the job. This program is available for both platforms and will go through your computer and get rid of all of those temporary and unneeded files. It will also work in the background and tell you when you should run the cleaner again. They have a paid “Professional” version and a free version. The free version should be just fine.
The second thing you should do is look at your desktop and move any files stored there to your documents folder. By keeping your desktop relatively empty you will know if a new icon appears on it. Many times, unwanted programs that you accidentally install will drop an icon onto your desktop. If you notice anything suspicious you can take action to remove it. I am always available to remove those pesky programs that just happen to appear.
The third thing to do is make sure your backup is working properly. If it isn’t working correctly now is a good time to fix this so you won’t lose any documents in case of a computer failure. If you are not sure how to check your backup or you don’t have a backup, I can help with this also. If you are using a cloud service like OneDrive or DropBox as a backup, you might want to watch this video since those are not really backups but syncs.
The last thing is to make sure that your anti-virus is working properly. If it has expired and you are no longer protected, your data could be in jeopardy. I have written a lot and made videos about anti-virus software. If you need one, I can also help with that.
Now that you have done all of these things your computer will hopefully be more organized, maybe a little faster and definitely safer. So Happy National Clean Out your Computer Day!!
The talk about how to avoid becoming a victim of scams. Email Scam Busters is your monthly resource to let you and your parents in on the latest scams they should look out fo
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