Safeguarding Data on a Laptop
Losing a laptop would be
an expensive event, but for many laptop users that price
pales in comparison to the value of the information stored
on the hard drive. You could lose your job, your security
clearance, your banking and investment information, and all
sorts of sensitive corporate or personal information.
These six ideas reduce the chances that a thief or a
finder-and-keeper can make use of the information on your
laptop:
Be careful about what you store on your laptop. Do you
really need to bring all of your personal financial records
with you on every trip? Does sensitive information from your
business belong on the laptop you take with you on a family
vacation?
Password-protect your
Windows operating system. Although password protection isn't
foolproof (a technically savvy and dedicated thief can use
password-cracking utilities to pick this lock), it usually
prevents the casual thief from accessing your system; they
may have to reformat the hard drive - erasing your sensitive
data in the process - to use the laptop.
Password-protect your
most sensitive data. You can add passwords to compressed Zip
folders in which you store your important data. Again, these
passwords aren't impossible to crack, but they usually stop
casual and amateur thieves.
Store your most sensitive
data outside your laptop. You can put this data on removable
storage media, such as a memory key or a recordable disc.
Keep that media anywhere other than in your laptop or its
case. Even better, store your data in password-protected Zip
folders on the removable media.
Log in every time. Never
enable your Web favorites to automatically log you in with
your username and password. That's the equivalent of leaving
the front door open and the safe unlocked.
You can, though, use a
password manager program that retains an encrypted record of
all of your usernames and passwords and automatically fills
them in; you need to unlock that single program each time
you turn on your laptop or each time you load your Windows
browser.
Encrypt, encrypt, encrypt! For industrial-strength
protection, use a hardware encryption scheme that scrambles
all of your data and locks it away behind a complex
password. This sort of system is almost impossible to crack.
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