Safeguarding Data on a Laptop

Losing a laptop would be an expensive event, but for many laptop users that price pales in comparison to the value of the information stored on the hard drive. You could lose your job, your security clearance, your banking and investment information, and all sorts of sensitive corporate or personal information.

These six ideas reduce the chances that a thief or a finder-and-keeper can make use of the information on your laptop:

• Be careful about what you store on your laptop. Do you really need to bring all of your personal financial records with you on every trip? Does sensitive information from your business belong on the laptop you take with you on a family vacation?

• Password-protect your Windows operating system. Although password protection isn't foolproof (a technically savvy and dedicated thief can use password-cracking utilities to pick this lock), it usually prevents the casual thief from accessing your system; they may have to reformat the hard drive — erasing your sensitive data in the process — to use the laptop.

• Password-protect your most sensitive data. You can add passwords to compressed Zip folders in which you store your important data. Again, these passwords aren't impossible to crack, but they usually stop casual and amateur thieves.

• Store your most sensitive data outside your laptop. You can put this data on removable storage media, such as a memory key or a recordable disc. Keep that media anywhere other than in your laptop or its case. Even better, store your data in password-protected Zip folders on the removable media.

• Log in every time. Never enable your Web favorites to automatically log you in with your username and password. That's the equivalent of leaving the front door open and the safe unlocked.

You can, though, use a password manager program that retains an encrypted record of all of your usernames and passwords and automatically fills them in; you need to unlock that single program each time you turn on your laptop or each time you load your Windows browser.

• Encrypt, encrypt, encrypt! For industrial-strength protection, use a hardware encryption scheme that scrambles all of your data and locks it away behind a complex password. This sort of system is almost impossible to crack.