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I also take care of my elderly father’s computer. Things are getting a bit more difficult as he descends into dementia. It’s not too bad now, but his short term memory is getting worse. He fell victim to the MS caller scam a couple of years ago, but I was able to clean that up quickly. I was also able to get them to reverse the CC charge before having his card cancelled and reissued.

Shortly after that, I decided that since all my father wanted to do with the computer was email, web browsing, and the occasional letter or spreadsheet, why not set his account to a standard (non-admin) account and set up an admin account for myself. And not tell him the password to my admin account.

This way, no one can install anything without the admin account password. An actual good use for UAC. (Win7 on his computer, at the moment.)

This worked well when the MS scammers tried again. Initially my father fell for it again (didn’t remember the last time) but something twigged and he called me while they were still remotely connected to his computer. As mentioned before, these scammers like to use Teamviewer to do their thing. I use Teamviewer to do remote maintenance, so logged in to my fathers computer and watched for a minute as the scammer kept trying to install something but couldn’t get past the admin password prompt. When I tried to chat with the scammer they dropped the connection. A check of the computer showed that they had not been able to do anything. And, fortunately, my father had not yet given them any CC details.

So, for those who maintain computers for elderly clients, setting their account to a standard user and having an admin account that they do not know the password to may help prevent some attacks.

Regards,
…jim

I use a combination of Macrium Reflect (free version) and Genie Timeline Home (using 2012 version, 2014 is current version, $39.95).

Computer has a 120gb SSD drive C: for system and a 2tb drive D: for data. An external eSATA 4tb drive serves as the backup location. Macrium reflect is scheduled to run every night to make an image of the system disk. Genie Timeline runs in the background and every 30 minutes makes a backup of any data files that are changed. Genie backups are incremental and versioned. During normal work, the backups by Genie are not noticeable (it has a smart and turbo mode.) During heavy work (video editing, etc.) a quick click on the system tray icon pauses Genie Timeline (if I forget to unpause it, it is restarted on next boot). Genie Timeline manages the space available on the backup drive quite well. However, every now and then I must go in and remove old Macrium image files (I really should automate that with a Powershell script…)

I also store selected important data files on Microsofts OneDrive cloud storage.

This is what works for me. YMMV.

…jim