Last summer, I purchased a brand-new Dell laptop for less than US$1,000. Including the cost of all the applications software I installed on it, its total value, brand new, came to about US$2,000.
That was then…looking on eBay last week, I discovered the value of my laptop has already fallen to US$560, perhaps even less. If it was stolen and sold to a pawnshop, the value would be even lower—perhaps US$200-US$300.
Yet, to me, my laptop is worth many times that amount. And I suspect yours might be as well.
First, consider the time it took you to prepare your laptop for use. In my case, I probably spent 4-5 hours reformatting the hard drive (to remove all the junk software of which Dell installed trial versions my consent), reinstalling all the Dell drivers and another 2-3 hours reinstalling all my application programs. (If you don't want to reformat the hard drive, you can use the "PC De-Crapifier" at http://www.yorkspace.com/pc-de-crapifier to remove junk software from your PC.)
Valuing my time conservatively at US$100/hour (wouldn't you rather be doing something else, too?), the real cost of my laptop, once it was "ready for action," was close to US$3,000, perhaps more.
Yet, that's just the tip of the iceberg. The value of the data on my laptop far exceeds US$3,000. It includes copies of all my books and reports, edits-in-progress, back issues of almost every article I've ever written and gigabytes of "source materials" on privacy, asset protection, international tax law and everything else I write about. Plus a lot more. If I lost this information and didn't have a backup, the loss would be incalculable.
And while I generally don't keep client information on my laptop (and when I do it's in an encrypted form), not all organizations are as careful as I am. Indeed, a recent survey from the Ponemon Institute, found that about 60% percent of laptops and personal digital assistants contain unprotected sensitive or confidential information.
What's this data worth? A lot more than US$300 or even US$3,000. A 2006 survey from Symantec Corp. found that the average laptop
contains data worth approximately US$972,000. And increasingly, savvy thieves aren't stealing laptops to sell them at
a pawnshop—they're harvesting the data they contain to use for identity theft,
industrial espionage, or other nefarious purposes.
What can you do to protect your laptop? The most important precaution is to encrypt your data—or even your entire hard drive—using a program like PGP Desktop 9.5 (www.pgp.com). Another idea is to not keep any data at all on your laptop—keep it instead on a high-capacity USB stick. Naturally, you should encrypt the data on the USB stock. If your laptop is stolen, your data remains intact. (Just don't lose the USB stick!)
You might also
consider traditional security tools such as laptop locks and remote security
tools that can help you find and deactivate your laptop if it's stolen. Among the products available are Microsaver
locks from Kensington Microware (www.kensington.com),
MyLaptopGPS (www.mylaptopgps.com), and
Inspice SmartProtec (www.inspice.com).
It should go without saying that you should always keep a backup for everything you do on your laptop or PC. Yet, several times a year, friends tell me they "lost" data because they neglected to make a backup!
I've found the easiest way to do backups is on high-speed USB sticks that hold more than four gigabytes (4,000 megabytes) of data. You can purchase these for under US$100 and it only takes 10-15 minutes to back up all your data on a modern laptop or PC.
Your laptop, and especially the data on it, is more valuable than you might think. Guard it carefully!
Comments