Protect Your Laptop and your valuable information

I wanted to share with everyone something I learned from a real estate agent a few months ago during a GRI class I attended in Sarasota, Florida. I noticed that one of my fellow classmates had one of those cool new paper thin Apple laptops with a small box the size of a deck of cards attached to it. I had to go over and check out this great new laptop. After speaking with her I learned that she had recently gone through what she explained to be nothing short of a nightmare; her business laptop had been stolen! Replacing the stolen laptop is easily done, but replacing your customer data base, history of customer communications, tasks lists, calendar, emails, documents, spreadsheets, pictures, etc. may not be replaceable. It took her months and countless hours to restore her lost information. My classmate then gave me some valuable information that I took to heart. Store all of your information on a portable external hard drive.

A portable or external hard drive is quite a useful piece of equipment. It allows the user to back up or store important information separate from the main internal hard drive, which could become compromised by online or offline activities. Sensitive documents, large music files, DVD images, movies, disk images, and even a backup of the contents of your main internal hard drive, can all be kept securely and safely on an external hard drive. When you are online, you can even leave the external drive turned off.

Another advantage of an external hard drive is that it is portable and operates on a plug-and-play basis. Any computer with a USB will recognize the external hard drive as a storage device, and assign it a letter to designate it. The drive can then be accessed like a normal internal hard drive. It's a snap to transfer huge files back and forth from work to home, to a friend's house, or between your desktop and laptop. Just plug in the interface cable to quickly reconstruct a working environment, making your favorite programs virtually portable. You can even buy several external hard drives (storage capacity 40GB up to 750GB), using one for multimedia storage, one for imaging, one for backup, one for work and so on.

Also make sure that you password protect your laptop to prevent unauthorized access. You will be protecting the confidentiality of your customers, work product and any sensitive documents you may have stored on your hard drive.

Thank you to my friend in Englewood for your excellent advice!