How to Take Your Data On the Go
Most of us use some sort of device to take our files with us on the go. This can be handy, but also scary, as this is when your data is most at risk for being damaged or stolen. Here, Tech Talker explains how to best keep files safe and secure when on the road.
This week, I’m going to talk about how to store your data when you’re on the go. When I say “on the go,” I mean when you’re traveling, going to work, or just have a thumb drive on your keychain. I’ve seen a lot of people suffer from stolen or destroyed data, which can occur when you take your tech everywhere you go.
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A majority people carry some sort of device with them to transport files when they are away from home. This is a great way to keep your files handy – especially when you’re on a computer but not connected to the internet, like on a bus, train or plane. However, this is also when your data is most at risk for being damaged or stolen.
Here are my quick and dirty tips for keeping your precious cargo safe:
Why to Backup:
First things first: always treat your storage device as if it is disposable. Now, I don’t mean to say you’re going to be throwing away any laptops, thumb drives, or portable hard drive. However, you should be ready to lose them at any point, and know that your data is backed up somewhere and secure.
If you keep the mindset that your device may disappear at any moment, you’ll be much more aware of the data that is on it. I set a reminder on my phone once a month to “Your laptop was stolen,” just to remind myself that data on it could be gone in a moment’s notice.
This may sound as if I’m being too cautious, but pause for a moment and imagine all of the important information that is on your laptop: all of your personal files, business files, pictures, videos – you name it. Now picture that when you go out to your car, it’s all gone.
This is all too often a realty for many people that have devices stolen. Oftentimes, the data that is missing is far more valuable than the cost of the hardware it was on.
How to Backup:
This is why I stress always having a backup of your data. If your device were ever stolen, as tragic as it would be, at least you would be able to fall back on your latest backup- and hopefully not lose too much data.
For this reason, I really like services such as DropBox, Copy, and Google Drive, which allow you to sync your files to the web. This makes it so that you are able to access you files anywhere you have an internet connection, and because the file lives on multiple devices (including the internet), you have a way of accessing it even if one of your devices is gone – whether it be broken, lost or stolen!
Another word of caution: please do not back up to a device that is in the same physical location as your computer. I’ve seen cases where a laptop was stolen, and the portable hard drive it was backed up to was also in the same bag. So even though the person had everything copied, it was stolen right along with the laptop, making the backup useless.
Why to Encrypt:
Having a laptop or hard drive stolen is often just a dangerous as losing your wallet.
Okay, great – you’ve now backed everything up, so if your portable hard drive or laptop were stolen, it wouldn’t be the end of the world, because your data is all saved somewhere else. Right?
Wrong. Having a laptop or hard drive stolen is often just a dangerous as losing your wallet.
Take a moment to think of all of the information stored on the devices that you carry with you every day. Phones and laptops will have your contacts, email, social media accounts, pictures, files, internet history and sometimes even passwords! Armed with all of this information, a thief would have enough information to cause a considerable amount of damage.
This is where encryption comes in. While it may seem overboard, I recommend encrypting all of the data that you carry with you. If you’re not familiar with what encryption is, it basically takes a password and randomizes your data, so that you are only able to read the data (or even know that it is there) with the correct password.
So if you lost a thumb drive, but had the data on it strongly encrypted, you could rest pretty assured that even if someone found it, it wouldn’t be of any use to them because they wouldn’t have your password.
The same goes for laptops.: they should have the whole drive encrypted so that you wil need to enter your password before the laptop boots up. This would make your laptop and all of the files useless to anyone who tried to steal it.
How to Encrypt:
This whole process is actually fairly easy to setup, and after you do it once you never have to think about it again.
Every modern operating system has a feature that allows you to fully encrypt your hard drive. Windows has BitLocker for full drive encryption, Apple has File Vault, and Linux has LUKS (and a few other options.) There’s also the ever popular TrueCrypt, which I still use on some of my devices; it has been abandoned for development, though, meaning that it’s still fine to use, but it won’t be receiving updates any longer.
If you just use Google or YouTube to search for your operating system plus ‘full drive encryption,” you’ll find more than enough information to get started – and it should all take you less than an hour!
You can also use TrueCrypt, which is available for any operating system, to encrypt folders and files. This is great if you’re using a flash drive as an external hard drive, because you can encrypt all of your files in seconds and take them with you wherever you go, confident in the knowledge that it would be impossible to access the files or folders without the password.
What About My Phone?:
At this point, you’re probably thinking, ‘Eric, you still haven’t mentioned anything about my phone!’ This is because most modern phones built within the past couple years have been hardened to automatically encrypt the operating system, and to back themselves up to their respective service, such as Google Drive for Android users, iCloud for iPhone users, and OneDrive for Microsoft users.
Well, that’s it for today! Be sure to check out all my earlier episodes at techtalker.quickanddirtytips.com. And if you have further questions about this episode, or want to make a suggestion for a future one, post them on Facebook QDTtechtalker.
Until next time, I’m the Tech Talker, keeping technology simple!
Photo of man with portable file courtesy of Shutterstock.
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About the Author
Tech Talker demystifies technology and cutting edge devices so that even the most tech illiterate can understand what’s going on with their computer or gadget — and what to do when something goes wrong.
