Google introduces a new app for better scans via the smartphone camera. Jefferson Graham previews on #TalkingTech. USA TODAY
LOS ANGELES — We have the perfect tech activity for your New Year’s Day.
Now that we’ve bought all those new gifts, returned the ones we didn’t like and partied all night long, let’s take care of our digital lives by protecting ourselves from hackers and backing up our precious photos, videos and documents.
Passwords. Yahoo told us in 2016 that more than 1.5 billion of its users had seen their accounts comprised. The presidential election was influenced by Russian hackers, according to the government. And you think it’s OK to continue using a password from a few years ago?
New Year’s Day is the perfect time to get with the program: change your passwords, as painful as you might think it be, every three months, with a combination of upper and lower case letters, numbers and symbols, long words (iloveusatodayeverydaybecauseofthesportsmoneylifenewsandtechsections) or two-step verification, which won’t let you sign in without typing in a newly generated text.
You can write down all the new passwords on paper and hidden somewhere in your house (not in an e-mail, please) or use a password manager to keep track of them for you. The managers also can generate the new passwords for you.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2016/12/24/tech-101—change-your-passwords-now/95823066/
Dashlane, 1password, Lastpass and Logmeonce are all popular and start at free. But you can expect to spend about $35 to $40 a year to subscribe and have access to them across multiple devices.
How they work: password managers are browser extensions for the computer and smartphone apps that will store your various passwords and log you in when you visit a site.
To access the passwords, you instead are asked to first type in one master password for the application. The master pass is stored on the device it’s created on, like your computer, and then synced to the cloud with encryption, so the password manager companies don’t have access to the original.
What if a hacker gets access to the master password?
Dashlane and others recommends using two-step authentication here as well as a second player of protection. It’s another great way to make sure hackers stay out of our lives, says Dashlane’s Ryan Merchant.
Backup. If you’re like me, you probably shoot many, many photos on your smartphone every month and generate new documents on your computer as well. How’s your backup going?
In 2016, we saw Mother Nature’s annual array of fires, earthquakes, floods and the like, and watched news reports of people losing their homes, often saying the only thing they cared about were their photos.
That said, back-up has never been easier. All you need is $50 to $100 for an external hard drive that will have ten times the storage of what we had five years ago (1 terabyte and up) or time to upload your photos and documents to an array of online solutions.
Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Apple’s iCloud, Amazon and Dropbox all offer online backup that is the safest, most secure option out there. Who’s more likely to lose data and have a hard drive fail, you or Google?
Rates:
- Google Drive (15 GB free) or $9.99 monthly for 1 TB.
- Microsoft OneDrive: (5 GB free) or $6.99 monthly for 1 TB.
- Dropbox ($2 GB free) or $8.25 monthly for 1 TB.
- Apple iCloud: (5 GB free) or $9.99 for 1 TB.
Amazon offers free photo storage with a $99 Prime membership, while the Google Photos website and app offers unlimited photo and video storage–but with a catch. The images have their resolution lowered slightly, but not enough to harm getting prints made.
I back up all my photos and videos on Google Photos, and write all my documents in Google Drive, which is free, and unlike Microsoft Word, I can access files from multiple devices, anywhere, without having to pay software fees.
Back to hard drives for a second. They do and will fail, but when you have huge amounts of data, like I do —terabytes worth of photos and video, you want to have multiple drives on your desk as well. I find that desktop drives that don’t travel last longer. Two great mobile solutions — a 256-GB flash drive will store thousands of photos and videos, and you could pick up one for just over $50. And if you’re all mobile, and stumped on how to get photos and videos off your iPhone, Sandisk has a cool gizmo called the iXpand, which plugs into the Lightning port and acts as a hard drive for your phone. A 32-GB version (twice the storage of the entry level 16 GB iPhone) sells for just over $35.
Digitize. For those of you from the analog era, with your shoe boxes of photos and shelves of 8mm and VHS videotapes, let’s get them saved to digital in 2017, okay?
For one, they’ll be safe, and secondly, now you can share them on Facebook, Twitter and privately. I like the services iMemories (50 cents per image, $12.99 per video, and/or $49.99 yearly to have stored on its website for sharing) and Scanmyphotos.com ($149 for a box holding up to 1,800 photos, and $19.99 per video) for getting the entire collection done in one full swoop.)
A cool new alternative came from Google in 2016 for small-scale scanning. The free PhotoScan app promises to get better scans than you were getting from your smartphone camera, minus some of the glare. Google enables this by taking four shots of the same image, and using software to erase the glare.
The app is great for visiting friends or relatives with a wall of photos that you’d like to get hold of. (You know, the best scanner is the one that’s in your pocket,) but I wouldn’t want to spend New Year’s Day scanning hundreds of photos this way. That said, if I was broke and couldn’t afford the other methods, it beats the alternative–not having the photos.
USA TODAY’s Elizabeth Weise, our tech security reporter, joined me for a Facebook Live new year’s tech resolutions video chat. Click the link below to watch us weigh in on backup, passwords and digitizing photos.
https://www.facebook.com/usatodaymoney/videos/1407818452575624/
Have further questions? We’re here to help. Write me on Twitter, @jeffersongraham and don’t forgot to listen to the daily #TalkingTech podcast on iTunes and Stitcher, where you should subscribe to the show and leave reviews, comments and suggestions. Happy new year everyone!
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