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
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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.
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2 comments:

  1. Anonymous4:37 PM

    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!

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  2. It is the question10:36 PM

    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.

    ReplyDelete