Data is easily lost. It is also easily stolen. And these are both facts that are easily forgotten by people who really ought to know much better, especially those who have come to rely on USB flash drives, external hard drives and other similar methods of carrying data about. The price of forgetting it can be high. If you are lucky all that wil have happened is you may have lost a few files. But it can get even worse if you are carrying confidential data or client information. Many companies now take these matters quite seriously. Friends who work in big law firms get given computers that have had their hard drives scrubbed of all other data. All they get is the information that they need for a particular job or trip. The data is often encrypted and when they return they hand back the computer to the tech department which then scrubs the hard drive again.
These sorts of measures may seem extreme for ordinary people, but don’t think that your private data is not vulnerable. If you were to lose it you might be embarrassed to find old high school photos out on the web. Or even worse you could end up getting robbed if someone steals you identity and hacks into your online bank accounts. So what can you do to reduce the risks. Well, the very first thing everyone should do is make sure their passwords to online accounts are not saved on their computers in unencrypted (or open) formats. If you do use the “save password” features of many web browses, be sure to then lock them down with a master password. That way you won’t find all of your online accounts hacked if someone gets hold of your laptop. The other thing to do is to lockdown portable media devices such as flash drives. I find that one of the best flash drives to use is the SanDisk because it comes with password file protection out of the box. A tiny bit of prevention can help save you from a lot of pain so be sure to keep your data safe.
