Protect what you value most- your unique data

The first thing you need to do is make sure you are performing regular back-ups of the data you care about. If you have a Mac, Apple's Time Machine function along with a dedicated external hard-drive will perform these backups for you. Windows, of course, has an automatic backup feature as well.

In fact, the smarter among us are working with multiple backups; one you control (like and external hard drive) and one you don't control (like a trusted cloud storage provider). This way, if something improbably terrible happens, like your computer becomes infected with and/or destroyed by malware that somehow also corrupts the external hard-drive connected to your machine, you have a third, cloud-based recovery option.

The other side of the equation is preventing an infection before it happens. There are two ways of doing this: one is to be smart about what you click on and intentionally or inadvertently download on your computer. The pitfall here is that we're only humans. Humans make mistakes — not to mention cybercriminals aren't dumb. They make a living off tricking people like us into installing bad things on our computers. So the other way of preventing infection is to let the machines do it for you by installing a trusted security solution.

Malware-driven data loss is a serious problem, so run an antivirus solution and back up your machines.