JDPFu.com 2025

1. Good, Strong Login Password
2. Full System Backup
3. Nightly, Automatic, differential backups
4. Use a Virtual Machine for your main OS
5. Encrypt important and sensitive data (email, work documents, passwords)
6. Set a default web page on a web server that has a friendly admin (who can look up the IP address for you sorta like LoJack)
7. Don’t retain any website passwords inside your web browser
8. Use an encrypted password manager like KeePass / KeePassX
9. Use an IMAP email server and leave all the messages on the server

After Stolen

Now that your laptop is stolen, you shouldn’t expect to get it back. OTOH, there shouldn’t be any sensitive data available to the crook either.

• That good password that you set, really doesn’t add much security. There are free tools to wipe / over write the existing password, but it does help with other things.
• The System Backup means you can restore your system to an identical computer. Identical means exactly the same model with all the same internals. If this is a corporate laptop, that will be easier to find a 100% identical replacement laptop. If this is a personal computer, you are out of luck if you run MS-Windows. Sorry.
• The incremental backups mean your data is available and it doesn’t matter what replacement computer you have. Good. It also helps with viruses, since you are backing up 30 days worth (or more). So, if you discover a virus on your system with 30 days of infection, you can figure out when the infection happened and restore from that point. Windows7 Pro and above includes a nice backup facility that does full and incremental backups. It works, use it.
• Using a virtual machine, VM, for your main OS and backing that VM up as data means you can restore a complete VM to almost any other computer (provided it supports VMs) and be productive in quick order. Restoring a VM is something that can be tested easily too. I like VirtualBox for desktop virtualization. I like ESX and Xen for server virtualization.
• Encrypt your important and sensitive data with TrueCrypt. I can’t recommend full hard drive encryption, but creating a few 3.9GB TrueCrypt volumes is very easy and useful.
• Never let your web and email programs remember your passwords. If you do because we are all lazy, change your email passwords immediately. If you use a password manager like KeePass, you can work through all your web passwords in an hour and change them. Good thing you had that backup, right?

The remaining things just protect you from different ways your data can be compromised by the thief. If your email isn’t actually stored on the laptop, you haven’t lost anything. Change your email password ASAP!

Replacement Laptop / PC

So, your laptop is gone and you aren’t getting it back today. Work and life go on. If you need a replacement immediately, spend an hour writing down the critical things needed in your next laptop. Here’s my list.

Summary

1. The most important stuff you need to do, happens before your laptop is stolen. Do it.
2. Test your replacement process. If you don’t test it, it is very likely that you missed something important. Seriously, test it. Please?
3. Your backups need to be to a different location. If the thieves steal your laptop from your home office, they will likely steal your USB backup drive too. Encrypted backups are a really good idea for this reason.
4. The same steps for a stolen laptop make sense for a broken laptop too. The encryption is a good idea to keep computer techs from rifling through all your files as they work on your PC.
5. Virtualization means you have a portable computing environment that isn’t dependent on the hardware. It isn’t suitable for gaming, but it does work fast enough that I run this way by default now and have for the last 18+ months.

I’m off to read that article linked at the top now. Did I miss something important?

Post Reading the other Article

That article painted a rosy picture of recovering your laptop by using a few different phone home software tools. Smart thieves now know to not boot the laptop before replacing the disk or performing a complete disk wipe. But with the low number of laptops deploying this method, I suspect there are a low number of thieves worried about it too.

I guess you can hope for a dumb thief and may get lucky with a recovered laptop … a few weeks later. What do you do in the meantime?