Laptop Anti Loss

Summary

Once you have protected your Windows system and you have protected your laptop BIOS, you want to secure your personal data. Basically you need 2 protections:

• Encryption: prevent anyone from accessing your personal data.

Many software companies provide software to encrypt your data. The idea is that nobody can access your data, even by physically opening your computer, because your data is encrypted and protected by a strong password.
Here again, we do not plan to reinvent the wheel. We propose the easiest, cheapest and most secure solutions. The first solution is to use BitLocker, which is a feature available in Windows Vista and Windows Seven. The second solution is to use TrueCrypt, which is a very reliable opensource encryption software. Experts will prefer to use TrueCrypt due to its opensource nature which allows anyone to double-check the encryption algorithms and verify that no backdoors are implemented.

• Backup: Make sure your data won't be lost when your computer is lost or crashes.

Some day or the other, your computer will crash or you will loose it, sell it or damage it. Your personal data, such as your work or family pictures is valuable and you don't want to loose it.
To avoid this, it is strongly recommended to backup your data, and it is probably not the first time you read so.
Typically people backup data on CD/DVD disks, but this becomes unpractical when the amount of data to backup is large. Other people backup data on an external USB disk. This is quite easy and unexpensive. However, we recommend to use online backup software such as Mozy or Carbonite. Provided that you have a broadband internet connection, it's a quite simple and efficient solution. For less than $50 a year, you can backup unlimited amount of data. It's all automatic and once set you don't have to worry about anything. You also use it to remotly access your files !