In an, I admonished you to not use common words – especially those from your life history – as your passwords. This is to prevent a determined human from hacking your accounts using their direct knowledge of you or from what they can find on the internet. It‘s critical too that you remember you are also trying to prevent a computer – which is doing little ‘thinking’ but running through thousands of common words – from getting to your password given time. If your password is in the dictionary, or is a common (or uncommon) name, or is in the atlas or encyclopedia, a computer will get to it sooner or later.

The that sits in a drawer is not protecting your data. If you don’t connect it to your computer and confirm that Time Machine has completed its backup, you have NO backups. And, when your computer hard drive fails or your laptop is stolen, the drive in the drawer will be of no help in recovering precious files.

Don’t back up your entire iPhone to iCloud. Loading it up with music you have downloaded from iTunes is a waste of space that could otherwise be used for essential data, things you can’t afford to lose.