This week, we spent time discussing the significance of secondary sources, as well as the pros and cons of digital storage. We also discussed online security, passwords, and personal archiving.  Personally, the class session opened my eyes to how much more careful I need to be about archiving the important information on my computer. The most “archiving” I’ve done is synced photos from my phone and saved them onto my laptop’s hard drive. I had no idea that if something happens to my laptop, there is essentially no way for me to ever access those photos or documents again. In the very near future, I plan on saving a bulk of my files onto some kind of “cloud” program like Professor Robertson mentioned. This way, if something happens to my laptop the information, like photos and old essays and medical records, will still be accessible and usable.

In terms of security and passwords, I definitely need to be more cautious. I have a habit of reusing the same two passwords tirelessly. Without going into too much detail here, I can say that I am also guilty of attempting to make my passwords more “foolproof” with capital letters and numbers, but apparently hacking software has caught up to these commonplace tricks, so I need to become more creative. On the bright side, my passwords do not include personal information or guessable dates anywhere. In terms of other security, I use a Mac and update it at least one every two weeks (it asks me to much more often), but do not have any extra anti-virus software running on the laptop. I do, though, disable cookies in all my internet software to ensure my computer won’t get a virus through that avenue. Overall, I need to work on making major improvements in my digital security.