I wrote about the dangers of travel awhile back, where I had concerns about information when crossing the borders of a country. However that's a case that most of us encounter rarely. However many of us do move information around on a regular basis with our devices, carrying them wherever we go. Each time we change locations, there's a chance we'll forget a device, or that one might be stolen from us.

There is a limited amount of information in our phones and tablets, but in many laptops, we can carry more information, and often do. No shortage of us keep database backups or imports/exports of data for development purposes. Our clients certainly have reports or data in Excel, but often that's a limited amount of data compared to what some of us might keep on our machines. In thinking about this, I wanted to ask this question:

What would you do if you lost your laptop?

I'm talking about the main laptop that you use for work. What's on it? What's important? How would you react? Have you even thought about it?

I have, and I've had laptops die, though never stolen. However I have taken some precautions. When I get a new laptop, the first thing I do is enable the whole disk encryption in Windows or OSX. I keep backups of the recovery codes at home and I make sure I've taken advantage of strong passwords and other encryption for information I carry. I don't have passwords saved for any VPN or other secure connections to banks or work.

It's not a perfect solution, but it's a start. Let me know today if you take other precautions.