-: File systems and hard drives.
Another aspect of hardening your operating system is
determining exactly what file system it should utilize.
The level of security of your system
is affected by its file system type.
There are many different file systems
available to choose from.
We have things like NTFS, FAT32,
ext4, the Hierarchical File System Plus,
and the Apple File System.
Windows systems can utilize either
NTFS or FAT32 file systems.
It's highly recommended, though,
that you use the NTFS file system.
NTFS stands for the New Technology File System,
and it's the default file system format for
Windows because it's more secure than FAT32.
It supports logging, encryption, larger partition sizes,
and larger file sizes than FAT32 does.
If your Windows system is running FAT32,
you can convert it to NTFS without losing any data, though.
The easiest method to do this is to open a command prompt
and type convert, the drive letter,
and then /FS:NTFS and hit enter.
This technique is something you should have
learned during your A+ studies.
If you're using a Linux system, you should
format the hard drive as ext4.
If you're using a Mac OS X system, you should use
Apple's File System since it is the
newest and most secure one supported by Apple.
In addition to choosing the right type of
file system, as we just discussed,
it's also important to use whole disc encryption.
This will help increase the security of your system.
It's also important for you to realize that
hard drives will eventually fail.
But there are five things you can do to help
postpone that failure and ease your recovery from it.
First, you should remove any temporary files
from your system by using a disc cleanup utility.
Second, you should conduct periodic file system checks.
If you're running Windows, you can do this by
running Check Disc, and the System File Checker.
If you're using Linux, you should do a file system check
by typing fsck in the terminal.
If you're using OS X, you can run first aid from
within the disc utility application.
The third thing you should do is perform a
disc drive defragmentation periodically.
On a Windows system, you can use the defrag command from the
command line, or run the disc defragmenter
from within the graphical user interface.
The fourth thing you should do is ensure
you have a good backup of your data.
After all, every hard drive will fail one day,
so it's important to have a good backup copy.
This can be performed using different types of software or
cloud solutions, depending on your business needs.
The fifth and final thing you should do is ensure that you
understand how to use different restoration
techniques and actually practice them.
This includes restoring from a system restore point
within Windows, restoring a system from a tape backup, or
backing up a hard drive, and even
restoring an individual file from your backups.
After all, the only way to truly verify that your
backup copy is good, is to attempt a restore from it.
In one organization I consulted with,
they had years worth of backup tapes.
They spent countless hours and a lot of
money on this take back of system.
But, when they actually need to restore from one of those
tape back ups, they weren't able to do it,
because the tape that they needed was corrupted.
If they had practiced restoring that data to a test server,
they would have known earlier that that data wasn't
really there, and they didn't have a good backup copy.