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Ask HN: What is your theft protection/retrieval strategy for your laptop?

8 points by hauget ↗ HN
I currently use two laptops: a Thinkpad with two drives that double boots into Ubuntu & Win7 respectively(each with encrypted home/user folders), and a Mac with two FileVault2 encrypted volumes in separate disks (one for OSX and the other for SuperDuper backups).

On the Thinkpad I manually change boot drives in the BIOS (which is pswd protected) whenever I use my Linux setup, but by default it will boot into Win7 where I have a guest account to use as bait in parallel with PreyProject. On the Mac side though, my theft strategy is less effective as PreyProject does not work on the Guest account (this last point is making me think of switching from FDE to just encrypting my home folder).

I also have stickers (courtesy of Casey Neistat) on both machines that say "Please do the right thing and return if lost to: my name & a burner phone"

I'm curious to know how you would improve on what I do and what your strategies are. Cheers.

8 comments

[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 16.8 ms ] thread
wingerlang
I guess my laptop is cheap enough that I wouldn't really care /too/ much and just call it upgrade time. All files I care about live in Dropbox.
elbigbad
I recently had my laptop replaced under warranty. They asked if I wanted to migrate everything over from the old hard drive to the new. I realized that I didn't need anything migrated because all my files were on Dropbox, it was pretty nice.

When I received the replacement, downloaded Dropbox and everything was there like it was before. Just needed to install some programs.

a3n
No suggestions for improvement.

What I do: Entire laptop is linux. Full disk encryption enabled. When I leave home in the morning (I almost never take my laptop for walkies), I hibernate the laptop. When I get home at night I enter the long FDE password.

Long term I hope that I remembered to hibernate on the day when a burglar takes the laptop. I don't much care if I get it back, I just don't want the data to be used for ID theft.

hauget
why not make a script to automate going from suspend to hibernate though?
a3n
Good idea.
JoachimSchipper
Well-intentioned advice: stop caring about the hardware, use full-disk encryption and ensure you have good backups.
hauget
From a "first world" perspective where you are constantly connected and can have backups done whenever you want, it's good advice. But if you're traveling a lot, have limited connectivity/resources and/or live in a third world country, you kinda care about that sub $500 or sub $1k investment ;) I want to get to the point where I don't care about the HW though. I've been getting more frugal over the years and emphasizing replaceability/low power/long battery life over faster/"better" though. Eventually I want to get to the point where I just carry around something disposable, but my game making ambitions and current interest in Unity3d are sort of making that hard. Then again maybe I'll just end up selling all my stuff down the road and carry around disposable HW so I can finish that damn novel in my head. :)
joeclark77
My strategy is that I gaze longingly at the new model laptops I'd like to upgrade to, if I had a good excuse to treat myself. Then I don't fret too much about the possibility of the old one being lost or stolen.