How to be safe while torrenting? Partitions? External HDD's? Or what? Advice wanted

S

slane

Bronze Level Poster
Hi all.

I have recently had to reformat my HDD due to infection of some kind. The question is, what can be done to help protect against needing to do this other than being careful of what to download and scanning files.

Would using another hard drive (external or internal) to save my downloaded data to, separate from the OS and System files mean that if I had another uncurable infection I could just reformat OS HDD and run boot time scan or whatever on data HDD. This sounds risky though, I could get re-infected right?

Any ideas other than 'don't torrent'?

Thanks.
 
mev

mev

Bronze Level Poster
Regardless of your downloading habits it's good practice to have your OS on a different drive or partition at least, even better to image your OS drive/partition as you want it for an easy fix when/if things go wrong.
 
Buzz

Buzz

Master
Make sure you Run a good Anti-Virus and keep it updated
Make sure you run a firewall and keep it updated.
Make sure to run a Spyware/malware prog and Keep it updated.

After that, there really is not much you can do bar being safe and not going on dodgy sites.

Only way to REALLY stay safe is NOT go online :p
 
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Finn

Finn

Enthusiast
If you are infected by a virus, there is no guarentee that it wouldn't also infect any attached external or network drives so from an infection point of view there is no advantage. Once a machine is infected, anything it has write access to is now suspect unless you independently verify the data using hashes/checksums.
 
vanthus

vanthus

Member Resting in Peace
As Mev said make a system image backup.If you have Windows7 this can be done very easily using Windows7 own program in "backup and restore"It costs nothing & contrary to common belief it works fine,
after two hard drive failures I speak from my own experience.
 
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