How to Survive a Virus Attack

In most tutorials you will be tought ways to keep yourself free of viruses and safeguard yourself from virus attacks. But what do you do if the thing in question is already there and is currently wrecking damage?

Antivirus software and other maybe enough at times, only if you know how you should use them, the steps to take. After all you just don't scan and delete whenever you were startled with a virus attack.

First you will have to do is backup your important documents. As for your program files, I suggest that you keep all your program installers in one place beforehand, so you can reinstall them in the unfortunate event that these programs are damaged by a virus attack.

Make sure that you do not use an erasable device to backup, try using dvd-writable and not dvd-rewritable for these backups. Don't think that you will keep this files for good, because they will be basically disposable after were done with the virus attack, so even if you duplicate a copy of the virus on the device is not important in our case.

Like on any fullscale war, your counter attack comes after you have evacuated your citizen to safety. Now is the right time to use your antivirus software.

Before you scan, put in the DVD-R with teh backed up files, and include both your local drive and DVD drive to the scan. Choose the best detection level, then start the scan. This might take awhile so be patient.

When the scan finishes, the virus will often be reported as two instances of each, one on the local drive and the other on the hard drive. But the thing is, the antivirus will only have deleted the virus on your local hard drive since the disc isn't erasable - it returns an error report.

Now what you have is a computer free of viruses and a CD backup of your computer with virus on them, and a list, namely a "log file" from the antivirus which tells you which files still has the virus on them. This will be important in determining if your important files have communicated the virus.

Note that: a virus will only work if given a chance to access your memory. So as long as you don't double click these infected files, you remain safe.

In case one of your important files has had the virus, it will be deleted from your hard drive, and the last way to recover is to access the infected backup...

Depending on the importance level of your file, you may want to use recovery software or other in order to fix the infected files. You should also try to fix it with your current antivirus but chances are still low that you will have an expected result. Mostly the file will be corrupted, and/or fragmented.