Thursday, June 07, 2007

How do you technically recover from laptop theft?

Right. So after the recent excitement of a stolen laptop, I need to go through the process of setting up a new laptop and recovering data, etc.

I'll make this useful by blogging about the IT trials and tribulations on my tech blog.

In the mean time, consider the following:

  • Install a stolen laptop tracker on your PC - if the fuckers ever connect to the net, it'll let you know and provide their ISP details

  • Keep invoices, serial numbers, etc in a safe place to facilitate police and insurance reports

  • Get one of those cable alarms that screams if your laptop is moved

  • Backups really are important - use a syncronisation app like iFolder to sync your laptop with the server when it connects to the network

  • Encrypt your harddrive - I am now a prime candidate for identity theft

  • Password protect the BIOS on your laptop - same reason as above
.

So I've been busy setting up the new laptop. What a mission. Anyway, it is a beautiful new beast. Follow the progress on my techie blog.

Here it is:













Vital stats here.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice one, those T60s are wicked.

You're right about people not putting much thought into disaster recovery, right until it messes up their life totally...

Personally, I use SyncToy to keep all my critical files up-to-date on a server somewhere, it's very flexibly configurable with different sync modes.

As far as sensitive information goes, I keep all that kind of stuff in encrypted pages in OneNote, just in case (even though, obviously, nothing's unhackable).

Enjoy setting up the new beast!

It is the question said...

Thanks Martin.

Unfortunately I inadvertently destroyed the Vista partition when I resized it to install Linux.

So my set up is a bit of a nightmare.