I was recently interviewed by Nora Dunn, The Professional Hobo about protecting your laptop and sensitive information abroad. I worked as a professional hacker for nearly 6 years before taking my act on the road and it was fun to talk security again. Too many travelers don’t take the few simple measures that would protect their information from thieves and governments who can easily access the data on your laptop. The article outlines some of my tips and advice and if you’re interested in data security and backups, I think you’ll find the article useful.
Also, I just published an interview with Laurie Tighe on the Tech Guide For Travel about a very useful tool for travelers called Budget Your Trip. It’s a tool that uses data from other travelers to estimate budgets and costs for cities and countries around the world. If you’ve ever spent hours trying to figure out how much to set aside for daily expenses on your next trip to India for example, Budget Your Trip is for you.
[photo by: yohann.aberkane]
This looks really interesting. I’ve been looking for something to help me keep track of my spending while I’m gone and I don’t mind sharing it with others.
It’s a neat little tool – you can also check out http://www.cost4travel.com/ which does something similar.
I went to the article about the security and it was amazing. I will forward it to my son and let my husband see it. This is something we really need to be on top of because we do so much traveling and I know we are not careful enough!
On a side note- what do you mean “I worked as a professional hacker for nearly 6 years…” Okay, you can’t just say something like that and go skipping away- we want to hear more on this. 🙂
Hi Anjuli, Nora is an excellent writer, the article is very fluid 🙂
haha, on the ‘hacker’ note, before I went off on my own I worked as a security engineer or professional (good guy) hacker. I analyzed software, physical security, and networks to advise companies how to improve their systems. It involved a lot of me getting to legally try and test/break things which was a lot of fun. I still do some of it on the side now as a freelancer.
I really need to update my about page (on my to-do list) to explain a bit further, it’s been an interesting road up until this point!
First and foremost, backups are the single most important thing to do while travelling. Let me repeat that so it sinks in. BACKUPS ARE THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT THING TO DO WHILE TRAVELLING. I have met so many people who have lost memory cards, had cameras and laptops stolen and have lost all of their memories. Do not become one of these people, create backups of all of your photos. Picasa, flickr, smugmug or set something up yourself. I have ALL of my photos and videos online http://adventureivan.com/photos/
Anil,
I agree with your tips for the most part especially around password security. I don’t know any of my passwords, they’re all randomly generated and stored in passwordsafe which you’ve recommended. However what I do have is one very strong passphrase to secure it: think a poem, song lyric or a quote, anything that’s a good twenty to eighty characters is pretty easy to remember since it’s a sentence rather than random characters.
I also email the password database to myself incase my laptop should get stolen.
Ivan
Great tips Ivan, I too don’t know most of my passwords except one or two ‘biggies’. I wish everyone took backups since the pain of losing a drive along with pictures and other important information hurts. Seems most people have to experience one major loss before learning their lesson (I did a long time ago) – but doesn’t have to be the case!
I’m glad that some have found the article useful, and thanks for your kind words, Anil! You’re the star, and the article shines because of your awesome advice. Cheers!
*blushing* thank you!
Interesting point on those online document storage sites. I just talked about Access My ID (https://www.accessmyid.com/) on my blog recently. I haven’t used it yet, still not positive I will, because at the moment I use the paper method you recommended. The other tips will come in handy when I prepare the tech portion of my trip. Thanks!
The thing I don’t like about sites like Access My ID is that they still just rely on a password. For that kind of information they should offer 2-factor authentication, like Paypal’s secure key option.
The paper method works well in most cases if nobody knows what the random text is associated with 😉
Very interesting article Anil. As I was traveling I was concerned with my photos being lost or something because of a hdd failure so i had cds and dvds. Still I was afraid of these being lost or broken so I uploaded some pics to flickr. However i was never completely satisfied. What you suggest might be what I need- you certainly know what you are talkng about. How fast are these systems? Meaning how much time do i need to upload say 1gb? I used to have an 80 gb external hdd and for some reason it burned once. I lost all my photos of 5 trips in it (gambia, tunisia, dominican republic, mexico, cuba), plus other stuff. Didnt have cds as well.
good stuff
Federico
http://www.maitravelsite.com
Hi Frederico,
Are you talking about CrashPlan? It works by doing one complete backup initially and then taking increment backups. All of the backups are assigned a low priority by CrashPlan so the speed depends on your overall Internet connection and what programs you happen to be running on the computer at any given time. The backups speed up when you’re not actively using the program.
A decent upload time would be something like 1-1.5 hour per GB I’d say. The initial backup for 20GB will take a good 24 hours but it’s very convenient once it’s done since the increments are typically much smaller sizes. You can also backup to more than one remote computer which gives you that much more reliability.
Let me know if you have any other questions!