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Q: You’ve helped me before – directly and indirectly – so here goes. I bought a 3 TB drive that I would like to use as my personal cloud for my various devices. I assume I can move all my data files to it and change the software I use to look to the “cloud”. Any issues I am missing? Secondly, what files do I need to move to use MS Outlook this way?

– Terry P.
Fort Walton Beach, Florida

A: Your details on the drive you purchased are a little sketchy, Terry. Not just any drive can provide Personal Cloud Services. Pretty much any device can store files, and as long as it’s shared-out and accessible, you will be able to perform cloud-like functions while on your home network. However, for a drive to truly be a Personal Cloud device, you need to be able to access its contents from outside the security of your home LAN’s firewall. That means the device needs to have a file server built into it, as well as software to control access to the contents, lest the entire Internet have the ability to read your private data. If the device you’ve purchased is such a device, then the answer to your question is yes–ish. To get rid of the “ish” and change that to a full “Yes”, you’d need to replace the word “move” with the word “copy” because I don’t recommend having this personal cloud be the sole location of your data files. Keep the master files somewhere else, and synchronize changes to and from your cloud device for ease of access and sharing among devices.

Regarding your second question, I’m afraid Outlook does not support being configured with its data files on a non-local storage device. Outlook uses special file access commands that Windows provides to read-from and write-to .PST files, and these don’t work well over a network connection. If you attempt to set-up Outlook this way, the likely result will be a corrupted .PST file. Really though, there’s not much reason to attempt this anyway. By keeping your e-mails on the server instead of downloading them, and then using the IMAP protocol to access it, any changes to your mail account (sent or received messages, folder creation, message movement, etc.) are instantly visible from all connected devices. In other words, you don’t need to try and keep your e-mail on a cloud device to sync it among a bunch of devices. You just maintain your e-mail in a single location on your mail server, and it can be accessed from multiple devices. In case you’re wondering, the e-mail address that you included in your question easily supports this configuration.

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 Q: I bought a Nextbook tablet a little more than a year ago. About a month ago, I started getting a message to delete “com.security.patch” so I tried finding out on the internet what was up. Nextbook was no help, but I did find some articles online about Android and the file. They sound like the tablet may allow remote access. What should I do?

– James M.
Fort Walton Beach, Florida

A: Well, as surprising as this may sound, James, your tablet has a malware infection. Yes, tablets and smartphones can get malware too. The problem isn’t as prevalent as it is on PCs, but it does exist. This isn’t something I have a whole lot of experience in dealing with, but once you know what you’re looking for, it’s pretty easy to find information online about it. This particular malware is called NotCom, or Nioserv. It creates a background service with the name that you mentioned: com.security.patch (it is neither “security” nor a “patch”). Some analyses that I read online said they observed this process sending relatively large amounts of data out to the Internet – as much as 96 megabytes over a 24-hour period. While I didn’t see where anyone has examined this data in enough detail to know exactly what’s in it, it seems like this is an information-gathering robot, and as such would be capable of transmitting anything on the device: contact list, stored passwords, pictures, possibly even a live view of what your camera is seeing. Nasty business.

The details of what Android malware does and how to get rid of it are far too large for my little column. So, as I usually do, I’m going to refer you to a 3^rd-party source that is more specialized in this area than I am. Hop over to tinyurl.com/IGTM-0466 and check out what Android Central has to say.