On Tue, 6 Feb 2018 16:32:25 -0500, Ralph Mowery
wrote:

In article ,
says...



It is really just as easy to avoid keeping anything you are worried
about off of your "browsing" PC and keep it well backed up. Do things
like your taxes on your air gapped machine. Most "hacks" are usually
things you clicked on and opened that you should not have.


Sort of hard to do taxes on an air gapped machine as the tax program
needs many updates. I use a computer to pay many bills, so hard to keep
that off the internet. I do use some external hard dirves for storage of
pix and other things I do not want to use. Thinking of switching to a
usb drive as the price keep comming down. Often burn them to a DVD.
Hard for a hack to mess that up.

You can't update the program on your connected machine and then move
it to the air gapped one?
I am surprised the tax folks don't give you the updates as a flat file
you can install anywhere. I haven't used a program for a while. I just
use the PC to fill in the PDFs I download from IRS. I put them on a
thumb drive, open that on a laptop that never sees the net and fill
them out. Print them and mail them.
I don't do any banking or bills online. I let my bank and credit card
company deal with that. I have recourse if they get hacked.
Things like pictures videos and music are really the disk drive hogs
but I have them on a few different machines and a lot of the stuff is
also on my web site, some you can navigate to, some you need the URL
and some is behind a password.
I also have several offline backup drives that I alternate using with
images of my C: (pretty much only installed software) and copies of my
data drives.