Since we’ve been on a security kick this week, I thought we might end the week with one of the most important things you can do to keep your accounts secure: Two Factor Authentication.

What exactly is two factor authentication? Also called ‘multi-factor authentication’, according to wikipedia, it is a means of authenticating that requires 2 or more factors to be able to access an account. These factors can be:

• A physical factor (bank card, key card, usb stick, etc)

• A knowledge factor (password, pass phrase, pin)

• An inherence factor (biometrics: fingerprint, iris scan, voice scan, etc)

While this sort of two-factor authentication might seem like something needed for access to places much more important than your email account (like say, a bank vault or secure government facility), you may have been using two-factor authentication without even knowing it.

It’s been nearly a year and a half since our last blog about data recovery myths. We gave you 15 myths that most people believe in regards to data recovery and data loss. While you are likely not planning on becoming a data recovery professional, a basic understanding of how data recovery works can help you understand what is, and what isn’t, necessary when it comes to data recovery. Hopefully by now, you understand that data recovery is not something only for businesses and people with too much money. Data recovery can be affordable, and necessary, for everyone. If you don’t understand how data recovery works, you could potentially find yourself overpaying for service, or not understanding why a price is reasonable for your data recovery case.

At some point, we’ve all heard of the Bell Curve, which usually has to do with some smarty-pants in your class getting such a high grade that everyone else has to work harder. But did you know, there is a curve for talking about the life of your hard drive?

The Bathtub Curve is designed to talk about all product failure. Of course, since the subject matter is failure rate, this often is used to talk specifically about electronics. Much like the Bell Curve looks like a bell, the Bathtub Curve looks like a bathtub basin.

On one side, we have the beginning of life for a product where the failure rate is high, but decreases at a very rapid rate. Electronics that fail at this point in the ‘life cycle’ are usually caught before they reach consumers - ie, you. These product failures would be caught during the testing phase of manufacturing.

In the middle, we have the lowest level of failure. This is during the normal lifespan of a given product. This is the time that consumers (you) are using the product. The rate of failure is at the lowest point in a device’s lifespan. This is by far the longest time span during the device’s life cycle.

We all know how horrible it is to lose data. Whether it’s due to an error with the hardware or a PEBKAC Error, the end result is the same (though some data loss causes result in more hair loss than others.) I will admit that I have accidentally formatted computers without backing up first, and lost pictures that could never be replaced. Of course, that was many, many years ago, and that hard drive is long gone.

While we can recover your lost files, no matter what the cause of the loss was, understanding what causes file loss can help you avoid losing critical data. There are four main categories of data loss: Hardware Malfunctions, Environmental Factor, Software Error or Corruption, and Human Error.