I recently heard about a friend of a friend (this is not an urban myth – but reality), who had the misfortune to “lose” his bag in a bar in London. Once he realised it had gone his first thoughts were, “what’s in there – laptop, wallet, car keys, and oh heck – house keys”. Within his wallet was £150 cash, 5 credit & debit cards, loads for loyalty / store / membership cards. Then it was a case of “what have I got?” Well the phone and Oyster card were in his pocket so he could get home and call ahead. Wrapping up at the bar and with scant consolation that his mates had to pick up the tab, he headed of home.
During the journey the realisation of the impact of the loss hit home. After cancelling a number of the cards he started to list all that he had lost – an activity that took 2 weeks as things forgotten come back to mind. Once at home thoughts turned to the laptop. Fortunately he had taken a back up only a week or so previously via a network based PC backup facility. Mail was all served via a Hosted Exchange provider – so that would all be there. So it was fairly easy for him to get back up and running in terms of files and e-mail. However even then he still needed to restore all the local settings and configurattion – maybe, he thought, image back-ups are the way to go!
Eventually all his cards were re-issued and various items were covered under insurance – but not all. Some weeks later he took to capturing some thoughts on the whole experience by way of advice for others – take or leave it, but you never know, one day this may be useful to you:
- get you laptop / PC backed up regularly to somewhere that is a different location to where your laptop normally is (no point in losing your PC and the back-up)
- check you security and encryption, we all keep sensitive details on laptops – what could be accessed if it falls into unscrupulous hands
- make sure your e-mail is mirrored somewhere if not hosted
- have a set of spare keys somewhere
- have a list of what you carry around to be able to easily recount all that may have gone
- backup you phone contents
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