Lock Down Your Laptop

By Michelle Hainer

As a freelance writer in Brooklyn, N.Y., Meredith Blake’s laptop is her lifeline. That is, until it was lifted from her luggage on a recent trip. Along with Blake’s utter disbelief that she had been a theft victim came the sinking realization that an enormous amount of personal information had been on her computer: invoices, tax returns, pictures and music -- all retrievable to a tech-savvy thief.

“It was like my eyeballs couldn’t process the void in my bag,” says Blake, who had bought the laptop in November and hadn’t even finished paying it off yet. “I was like ‘Are you kidding me?’”

Sadly, Blake’s computer and data were truly gone. And while laptops can be replaced, the information you keep on them may wind up in the wrong hands, which brings on a whole new set of worries. Luckily, the following steps can help you secure your laptop when you are on the go and also protect your files and information should it get stolen or lost.

Step No. 1: Lock your laptop
While it goes without saying that you should never leave your laptop unattended, it doesn’t hurt to literally lock it down, too. The Targus DEFCON computer cable lock ($34.95) allows you to bolt your laptop to wherever you’re sitting, making it much more difficult for a crook to carry it away.

Step No. 2: Back up your info
“More and more irreplaceable items -- photos, financial documents, checkbooks -- are being stored on computers,” says George Symons, CEO of Yosemite Technologies, a data protection software company in Sunnyvale, Calif. “But make sure that info isn’t only on your laptop.”

Symons recommends investing in an external hard drive or USB drive, where you can store pictures, music files and documents. Either of these hard drives, which are often inexpensive and small in size, plug into your computer’s USB or Firewire ports, allowing you to manually copy files onto them. You can also buy a software program like Yosemite Filekeeper Pro ($29.95), which automatically copies any new file on your computer. Symons also suggests web-based archive services like Apple iDisk, X-drive, Carbonite or Mozy, which allow you to store pictures, music, documents and more for a monthly or annual fee. If your laptop is stolen, your files can be reloaded onto your new computer.

Step No. 3: Invest in encryption software
If a thief does take off with your laptop, a great way to make the information on it unreadable is to scramble it through a process called encryption. Sounds complicated right? Luckily, if you have a PC, you can purchase software like HandyCrypto or FineCrypt, which will automatically encrypt your documents, making them readable only to those who have the keycode. On a Mac, you can use a preloaded application called FileVault to protect your goods.

Keeping your laptop password protected (using a passkey that contains at least eight characters and a mixture of letters and numbers) is also a good idea, though this won’t necessarily protect your data, says Symons. Often times, thieves remove a laptop’s hard disk and plug it into another computer, which can render your passwords invalid and give them access to your data.

Since Blake’s laptop was taken, a friend offered to give her her old one, which was a tremendous help. And she’ll no doubt use more security measures in the future. Though still shaken by the experience, she can at least put it into perspective: “It would have been more devastating if I had been working on a novel, and it was saved on my computer,” she says.