Laptop Safety

If you read my earlier post about All Purpose Laptops and ran out and bought one, or maybe bought one just before the end of the year, let me ask a few questions. I'm working on some laptop safety guidelines now, and I'd like to hear from you.

Did you get a laptop with pre-boot disk encryption built in? Or did you buy a third party encryption product to keep your data safe? If not, why not?

Do you have a good backup system for the data on your laptop? Online backup services that work over the Internet really take the pain out of backing up laptops that stay out of the office most of the time. Are you using automated backup of some kind on your laptop? If not, why not?

If you lose your laptop, will you get it back? One survey from 2005 said over 4,500 laptops were left inside cabs in the city of Chicago alone. Not long after the new Denver airport opened, they reported nearly a thousand laptops a week were left behind at security checkpoints. Not stolen, just forgotten. If you forget your laptop, what are the odds you'll ever see it again?

Send me a note if you have good answers to these questions. Send me a note if you do something interesting to protect your laptops. Or send me a note if your company says laptops are dead and you do everything with smart phones.

• SMB
• backup
• encryption
• laptop
• security