This has been a bad summer, so far, for laptop loss. In January 2005, in blog entry Lost Laptops, I talked about this problem and some solutions.
In June alone we've read about the loss of laptop or notebook computers from
- hotels.com
- Buckeye Community Health Plan
- the Mental Health Hospital at Fort Logan
- TG
- the State of New Jersey
- the Department of Energy
- the IRS (fingerprint data, also, in this one)
- Ohio University
- the YMCA Japanese telecom KDDI
- and the US Department of Veterans Affairs
Prevention is easy. Enterprises can encrypt or password lock hard drives. They must write policies and procedures backing those up. This is an old problem with solutions that keep on getting better.
Wake up out there!
I've turned on FileVault on my home directory on my PowerBook. It seems to create an encrypted virtual volume. So, this is practicing what I preach. But, I've noticed something strange (that I think is related): I can no longer create anything in the top-level of my home directory (/Users/fred).
I do not know if this is related. I cannot backout of FileVault without deleting a bunch of files, although how much can I trust this. Look at what it says for the needed disk space. I have 60G disk. Hmmmm.
Comment on this.
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