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Listen to the podcast: Are you
ready for your computer to be stolen? 
Transcript
This is Leo Notenboom with news, commentary and answers to some of the many questions I get at askleo.info.
Anyone who's worked with computers for any length of time has experienced a disaster of some sort. The crash that happens just before you save your document to disk. The failure that renders a disk unreadable. You know the drill.
You are prepared for that, right?
By prepared, of course, I mean backed up. Consider what you would lose if your hard disk self-destructed. I mean what if it failed so badly that it was totally lost forever. Would you be able to recover important documents and information from other sources?
Why not?
Backing up is so easy to do. Personally, I do it without thinking - it happens automatically every night. Yeah, yeah, I'm a geek, and you certainly don't need the scripts and programs that backup the 8 machines I have here at home. There are many simple and automated solutions that, once you've experienced a failure, you'll agree are worth every penny you invested.
You say hard disks don't fail that often? That might, or might not, be true, but it does happen. Regardless, having your computer stolen is just as bad, if not worse. Not only do you not have your data, but some theif might.
That's where encryption comes in. If you have sensitive personal data on your hard drive, and especially if that's on a portable computer, I would seriously considering also using an encyption tool such as Cypherix's Cryptainer, or the free open source project TrueCrypt. Both can create virtual encrypted drives that are nearly impossible to crack without the passphrase. Do not rely password protection in applications, such as word or excel, or tools such as WinZip - most of those are fine for keeping honest people honest, but are easily cracked with information found on the internet.
You'll find links to the tools I've mentioned, as well as related articles, in the shownotes. Visit askleo.info and enter 7758 in the go to article number box on the home page. You can also comment on this podcast, or any of my articles - I'd love to hear from you.
This is a presentation of askleo.info, a free on-line technical question and answer service. Hundreds of questions and answers are online and ready to help solve your computer problems. New questions and answers are added daily.
That's askleo.info.
Article C2352 - May 16, 2005