For safety, backups are much better than encryption.

The only thing encryption does is prevent others from reading your data if the machine gets physically lost or stolen. And ironically, that might prevent a stolen machine from ever making it back into your hands.

For desktops, encryption of a machine that doesn’t have critically private/sensitive content is even dumber. I mean, if you have terabytes of CP or are a terrorist, then sure, lock that down to make the police earn their wages. Or do it even if you don’t, but you just want to give authorities the middle finger.

But not much on the average computer needs encryption so long as you keep good physical and network security. And the problem with that is much of it is behavioural - they will need to learn how to not do dangerous things online and off.

In order to protect data is a good backup system - something that just works, is dummy proof, can be administered remotely, and which can restore content easily and reliably.

On a Mac, nothing beats iCloud. It’s encrypted before it even gets uploaded, and Apple has repeatedly shown it cannot retrieve the content… it needs to be forcibly cracked.

On the PC (both Windows and Linux) I prefer Duplicati backing up to BackBlaze B2.

I actually like the Microsoft Authenticator, as it dramatically improves security for Microsoft Accounts. Not only does it plump up 2FA TOTP from 6 digits to 8, but it can also implement challenge-response codes as a second layer of protection.

What I do not agree with is putting your computing eggs all in one basket. I have never used a Microsoft Account to secure Windows, and I never will. Complete data loss via loss of control of the Microsoft Account is just too high of a persistent threat. And that risk rises by an order of magnitude the less technically inclined a user is. For someone who has almost no computing experience, it is an unconscionably risky system to use.

• The average user has no need to use Bitlocker
• The average user should be using a local account instead of a Microsoft Account.
• Using a Microsoft Account causes Bitlocker to auto-enable.
• Loss of access to your Microsoft Account when Bitlocker is enabled can cause loss of all your data.
• Microsoft can and will roundly ignore you if you lose access to your Microsoft Account.

Microsoft has painted users into a very dangerous corner. Security is vitally important, but not when it’s almost maliciously implemented.

Even as a security professional I understand that most people will be ill served by having their computer locked down like Fort Knox. There are ways of ensuring security without having all personal content go permanently poof with the slightest wrong move.

Somewhere between 1 in 5 to 1 in 3 jobs aren’t real.

Those are rookie numbers, suppressed by the lack of ghost jobs in blue-collar industries.

In tech, ghost jobs make up an average of about 60% across all tranches.

That’s just shy of ⅔ of all job postings. And this is a conservative estimate.

My wife named her first SUV - a dinky Equinox - “pebbles”, purely because it was a light stone grey.

Her next SUV - a more beefy 4Runner that can actually hold the Gunner dog crate comfortably - is “snowflake”, purely because it was a pristine snow white.

I think I’m seeing a pattern here with my wife.

“Accidentally”.

Uh-huh. And I bet they’ve had a massive bump in sales from this “accident”, as underage people swarm vendors to see if they could score one of these “accidental” cans.