Avoid Stolen/ Lost laptop disaster
Guess
how many laptops are stolen or lost each year? According to technology
research firm Gartner a laptop is filched every 53 seconds. That’s approximately
1440 laptops snatched each day. Annually it adds up to roughly half a million.
Given that approximately 50 million laptops are sold annually, it’s an awful
lot of theft and loss… and an awful lot of distressed people.
Deeply personal
Laptop
theft isn’t about numbers, it’s deeply personal. People who have laptops stolen
often feel vulnerable and even stupid. It can also eat away at a sense of
security.
That
said, often it’s not the big things that are lost that cause upset but the
little things like photos of family and friends, files that hold personal
information and sound or music files.
If
your laptop is lost or stolen there are a number of steps you can take to
minimise the damage:
Password protect your laptop
- Set up your laptop so you have to enter a password every time you boot up. It should be difficult-to-guess and composed of capital letters, numbers and symbol.
- Enable two-step authentication on any site that holds personal data such as Facebook, Twitter and Google.
- If you already have a lot of ‘complex’ passwords you could store them on a cloud service like Dropbox, if you trust it or another service to be secure.
- Alternatively a password manager can be used which allows you to log in with one universal password.
Encrypt your hard drive
The
hard drive holds all the data on your computer. There are stories about villains
of various stripes that have attempted to destroy evidence on computers by
throwing them into swimming pools or even setting fire to them.
But
hard drives are tough and not easy to destroy. This is why it’s a good idea to
encrypt your laptop hard drive. If someone does a ‘snatch and run’ with yours
they’re in for a disappointment because an encrypted hard drive doesn’t give up
information, even if it’s taken out of a computer.
An
encrypted hard drive is like Michael Sylvester Gardenzio Stallone (his full
name) in the Rocky films, near indestructible whatever is thrown at it. There
are quite a few hard drive encryption tools out there. To find one that is
suitable carry out an Internet search.
Clean up your laptop
It’s
not a bad idea to ask yourself whether you really need to have all those files
on your laptop. If you can strip the data on your hard drive back to the bare
essentials, the teeth gnashing stress of a lost or stolen laptop can be reduced
to a tic in the eye.
Ask
yourself whether you really need to carry your blueprint for world domination
everywhere you go? It’s likely that many files would be better off on your home
computer, external storage or even a memory stick, as long at its tucked away
safely.
Back up, back up… and back up
This
is a golden rule that many of us ignore. If we don’t back up files imagine the
devastation when a laptop is lost or stolen? All of that hard work and personal
stuff, gone. Forever.
It’s
easy to put off backing up data so the best thing to do is get into the habit.
Every time you boot up your laptop at home or the office, plug in an external
drive, or use a cloud service, and back up. Apparently after repeating an act
22 times it becomes habitual. So there you go. In only three weeks and the
blink of an eye and you’ll be backing up like a pro.
