Depends on what you consider “effective”. There is no antivirus product on the market today that can guarantee 100% immunity from virus infection. The best you can expect is a reduction in the risk. Some reduce it more than others, but there is no silver bullet.
I’ve been hit with this twice - nothing on the PC works except on and off. Local computer shop can fix. If you pay I see no reason why they wouldn’t have installed something to do it all over again next week. It claims to be from the FBI, Interpol and threatens felony prosecutions. I’m more careful where I surf now. I’ve got anti-virus, etc.
That’s not the Cryptolocker virus.
No, if it’s a continuous file-by-file backup to the cloud those files will be encrypted too. However, if your service provides versioning you’d be able to recover the previous unencrypted version.
I’m guessing this is an issue for Windows and not Mac? Or is there the same/similar scam for Mac OS?
I haven’t heard of it affecting Macs yet, unless the Mac is sharing files with Windows machines.
This is legit and will stop current versions from running. Another good way is to not open unexpected/unneeded/unknown e-mail attachments.
Crashplan. Unlimited backup, about $80 a year. Works great.
Although I haven’t looked into it, if I used a service like that, I would be severely limited by the allowed bandwidth from my ISP (Charter cable). Unless I got a commercial account (hundreds per month), the nominal maximum data I can transmit & receive is in the 250GB-500GB per month range, which I typically exceed anyway. Trying to backup 30TB of storage and keep it current could put that pretty far over the top, and $80 per year would not be the main expense.
The technology isn’t there yet.
Doesn’t providing a way to be paid make them easily traceable?
That’s why I use DVDs to backup. Write once can be an advantage. I’ve always worried about keyloggers. It’s odd that they chose this method of openly asking for money; I think getting passwords and credit card info would be much more effective. Maybe keyloggers aren’t as dangerous as I thought?
I think it’s because it’s much easier to trace fraudulent credit card transactions, whereas bitcoin transactions are nearly untraceable.
The technology’s just fine for normal users. Having 30TB of data, all of which apparently needs to be backed up, puts you about a hundred standard deviations out on the population of computer users data sizes. People with your sorts of needs are always going to need specialized solutions.
No specific insurance, my main storage is in a drobo NAS array and make a backup to a second machine in my shop weekly. I had been pondering setting up another box at home as a colocation point, but have not bothered yet.
The likelihood of customers losing something mission critical at the same time I have a major outage that destroys an array as well as my backups is pretty small. Even if every hard drive I had failed at once I can reload the storage server from scratch and have the system up and running in a few hours. I would have to make a pile of phone calls and a bunch of remote sessions with customers to rebuild the account DB so the client software could log in, but even then I could have everything rebuilt in a few days. Any of the larger customers I already have remote access to their servers so they probably would not even notice a problem as I would just log in, recreate the accounts and restart the backups.
^Thanks! Curiosity cured. 
I really doubt it’s that rare. It’s certainly unusual, but if you’re in any creative field (especially video), you’re probably using up a lot of disk space. I currently have 15TB wired to my computer, and I’m not even using a server or anything, just direct SATA connections.
I understand it’s certainly not the norm, but it’s not that rare.
The truth is, I just don’t trust the cloud solutions to holding my data. A few years back, there was a whole fiasco when some off-site storage company went belly up and gave all their users a couple of weeks to take their data off before they took it offline forever. I can’t remember the name of the company off-hand. I guess I would use it as yet another backup for my data, while keeping two copies locally, anyway.
I was exaggerating with the “several hundred standard deviations,” but I read a while back an article on digital photography. One of the things it mentioned was that the prevalence of digital cameras had changed the average *lifetime *data storage for computer users from less than 100 MB to several gigabytes.
Yes, there are exceptions, but 30TB systems, and even 15TB systems, are likely limited to video production and gene sequencing, and these aren’t the “casual users” we’re talking about. Again, if you’re generating that kind of data, expecting cloud services to handle your backup isn’t reasonable, but that doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t work just fine for the vast majority of computer users, and effectively all of the “I don’t know how to do anything other than e-mail” customers we’re talking about here.
With that kind of volume you are also looking at things like 10Gbit ethernet just to move local backups to other machines in house before its time for tomorrows backups. Regular gigabit you are looking at like 30 hours a terabyte, hooray for incremental backup. 
I’m actually only in still photography. I can’t even imagine what amounts of data video guys are pumping out. My brother does graphic design, and he’s easily in at least the low 10s of TBs. Of course, my perspective is unusual, since many of the people I know are graphics professionals, so they’re all going to be in a similar boat as me.
Video production and TV station data storage (which is what generates most of my data) takes up more room than you can imagine, if your base is only digital photography. Take one digital still photo at hi-res, multiply it times 1800 for each minute of run time, and even with some compression, it adds up incredibly fast.
Then when you realize that an hour of original final video might have 3 hours of raw footage behind it that you don’t want to lose, and several variations on final edits, then realize that next year’s camera will have 2X the resolution of this year’s, creating 4X the amount of data, and you begin to get the picture.
I’m not working in the extreme hi-end range, but a one hour show might easily generate 10GB of files, including all associated stuff (edit scripts, still photos, sound, multi-cameras, documents, talent releases, outtakes, etc.). To safely back it up, I make 2 copies on different equipment and would like to have one of those in the cloud or at a remote location.
I never open email attachments unless they are from someone I know (and even then only if the accompanying email is clearly a personal message. None of these generic “This is interesting, look at it” messages. Also most of the files I care about are duplicated on my office Linux server. And I send them there. But I think I will copy my dropbox directory to an external hard drive and then disconnect it.