Fighting a virus I picked up somewhere

[Larz60+]

I haven't been on at all since lats night.
Somehow picked up a virus from some site. It attacked my chrome cache first, starting a forked process that was filling the cache with junk.
Soon I was getting warnings that my system partitions were getting low.

At any rate, pretty much spent the day restoring everything, and not there yet.

Diligent backupsmay be a pain in the butt, but they sure do pay off when needed.

[wavic]

Backups are mandatory if you want to sleep well. I had a really ba experience with a virus years ago and I had to wipe out the hdd. There were no tool that cold fight that virus. Since then I am on the Linux side.

[Larz60+]

I also isolate my OS onto a separate drive.
I have always planed on having a spare drive with OS installed so that I can swap out, but haven't done that so far.

That would require keeping the version up to date.

[Larz60+]

Much easier said than done. I've been at it for 50 years and haven't found a foolproof method yet!

[wavic]

If the partitions are mounted there is no difference if a partition is on a separate drive. If you have network devices mounted they will be affected too. One must put defenses wherever it's possible. The router, the OS's network, the OS. You may try to create an encrypted disk image and put your important stuff there. Or just use external hdd and plug it in the usb only when you need to use it. It could be complicated sometimes.