Join us for a few moments and answer these four quick survey questions.  Don’t try and click the circles below, it’s just an image file, but answer the four questions in your head.

Unless you live in a rural area, most folks will answer the first three questions with a resounding YES!  Although, I have had a few folks say no to “Do you normally lock your car doors?” but they admitted that their car was so old and run down that they had no fear it would be stolen.  However, not enough folks answer yes to “Do you lock (encrypt) the data on your laptop.

Now consider one more question:

Unless you keep lots of stuff in your car, replacing your car is typically all about money.  Likewise, things that are likely to be stolen from your house – DVDs, stereos, TVs – are also all about money.  While you might have photos, or scrapbooks or souvenirs, they are less likely to be stolen as they won’t have the same value to anybody else.

But your laptop or your home computers – they are typically irreplaceable.  Actually, that is not quite true as any of your computers can be replaced by money alone.  The hard drive that is in or attached to your computers, that is what will be near impossible to replace without both money and extensive amounts of TIME!

Just stop for a moment and start the list of how you would recover from the theft or loss of your hard drive.  Do you have passwords on the drive that somebody could use; do you have any financial data that they could access, do you have any confidential data in your email (check out this article on Laptops Loaded with Private Data).

Now, compare this to $13.00 a month for the safety and security of hard drive encryption.  Do you have automobile insurance? Do you have home owners or renters insurance?  Do you have life insurance?  Are you taking the same precautions to secure your digital information?

Think about all your data.  All your documents.  Maybe your photos and music.  It’s great to have backups – and that will help you if the hard drive fails. However, if somebody takes the laptop or computer with hard drive inside – are you prepared to deal with the loss?

So either keep your computer at home or the office securely under lock and key – or take some action to ensure that your computers are secure and safe with hard drive encryption.

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