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Of course preventing them from getting stolen is the top priority, but invariably, someone is going to get jacked. What are some good practices to minimize the damage incurred when your PC is stolen?
Given most of our PCs contain our entire lives, its frightening to know that all this information can be in someone else's hands.
Some ideas i had (a bit paranoid, i admit).
- keep encrypted backups. Use truecrypt to have double encrypted (with strong password) volumes where you store your personal data.
- schedule Eraser to run every evening so that potential thieves couldn't undelete (and subsequently retrieve) sensitive data
- do all your banking in a virtual machine. Keep the virtual machine volume encrypted, and on a portable usb drive that you carry with you / keep in a safe.
- have applications that phone home (or hit something to leave an IP trace) upon connection to the internet (can someone suggest a good solution for this?)
Does anyone have any other suggestions?
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Obligatory xkcd link: http://xkcd.com/538/
– Badaro – 2009-08-03T21:03:08.450this is all good, but there's no need for apps that phone home if everything is encrypted an requires a password... The thief will just format everything. What about a fake partition, sort of a honeypot ? – Manu – 2009-08-03T21:03:44.797
well all software based things like encryption don't really save you from theft of your laptop, they only secure files if that happens ;) – schöppi – 2010-10-31T23:29:33.473
@Jacob - One thing that isn't mentioned in the duplicate that seems of interest to you is that there are laptops with builtin GPS reporting/webcam access/etc in case of theft - basically LoJack for your laptop as mentioned on the other side but already on the machine and using the built-in cell network access. I know Lenovo sells this as an option - not sure if any other major OEMs have it available without making a special request to sales. – Shinrai – 2010-11-01T16:08:12.140