I own a laptop, and I consult with big companies, so I have to take extra care of the data that's sitting on my laptop. My biggest concern until lately was hard drive failure. Imagine if all my work went to the big bit bucket in the sky? That would be devastating, so I took normal precautions of backing up my data on a regular basis.
However, I have a new biggest concern -- data security.
I recently had a huge computer melt down ( and of course it was right in the middle of a major compliance effort ). I turned my computer on, it blinked a couple of times, then quit. No more life. I hit the power button several times, but it flatlined and wasn't coming back.
Prior to the meltdown, I made sure to follow all the good security rules. I had both a BIOS password and a Windows password. Both were different, and both were very hard to guess with special characters and numbers and everything.
Obviously, I was in need of a new machine, so in short order I was up and running on my new tablet ( which I love a lot better than that old heap anyway ). But what about all my data?
I thought I was going to need to access my backup, but it turns out I didn't need to. Although quite a convenience, what I was about to find out was quite disturbing. My motherboard fried, but my hard drive was well in tact. So my hardware guy just extracted the hard drive from the corpse, wrapped it in a fancy case with a USB port, and voila! My old internal hard drive was my new external hard drive. For about $60, I had all my data again!
I thought it was great at first, but then I realized that all those passwords didn't make my data secure at all! I'm sure all the thieves out there know how easy it is to pull a hard drive out of a computer and turn it into an external hard drive -- bypassing any BIOS and / or Windows password security. It's so simple!
So be careful. If the data on your computer is sensitive, make sure to use some sort of hard drive encryption software like GuardianEdge or a hard drive that has encryption technology built in, like the Seagate Momentus® 5400 FDE.2 hard drive.
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