My laptop is highly-specified, with a beautiful sharp screen, and I use it as my primary work machine. Anyone who has been around me when I’ve travelled with it will know how much I worry and take precautions for protecting it.
Recently, my ‘unthinkable’ happened – the laptop was stolen.
I’d taken it over to New Zealand for a ‘working holiday’. My Dad lives there now, so I have the luxury of being able to take, say, a month’s break over there. We’d left for a long weekend of camping (or ‘tramping’ as it’s known by Kiwis) along the Abel Tasman coastal route. We returned to our pick-up point a little weary, covered in insect bites, but very content. We were told that the house had been broken into. My heart crashed- my brain raced to remember what was on the laptop that I might have lost.
I keep a backup of my code and graphic work at home in the UK, so I knew that was recoverable, though I had a biting feeling that I’d not set up a backup routine for my emails (which I use intensively for reference) or program setup files. I also suspected I’d lost quite a bit of personal stuff, though I couldn’t quite remember what.
We made lists of what had disappeared and bought a cheap-ish home computer for our general use (in total, four laptops had gone).
The Wellington and surrounds crime investigation units were brilliant. Over the next couple of days they’d searched a couple of properties and made some seizures, some of which was definitely our gear. This was released to us about a week later.
A lot of stuff is still missing, but – astonishingly – my laptop (and that of my step-mother) were recovered. Hers was still in full working order. Mine would only boot into a Dell password-protected screen, so I suspected they’d attempted to wipe it. [See: The Dell 'White Screen of Death'].
An experience like this pulls reality into focus- was I prepared for losing my computer? The answer was ‘no’.
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