Lessons I learnt when my laptop was stolen

I think TrueCrypt is the only good advice there; hiding a folder does nothing for your protection (people don't look at the stolen laptop for your credit card information, regexes do), and using hardware encryption just sounds like a disaster waiting to happen, like consumer-level "hardware" RAID. (RAID controller dies; your data does too.)<p>I'm still surprised that people don't encrypt all their personal information, especially on laptops. Truecrypt doesn't even require a reformat or reinstall -- download it, click a few buttons, and your data is safe and there's almost no speed hit.

"so that even if someone gets in, they have to have basic skills to get to your data"<p>if they want your data, they'll just plug the HDD in to a different machine and bypass windows security that way, OS passwords only dissuade the most casual criminal

Full disk encryption (hardware based) on SSD seems like an interesting option for this but not many manufactures have this. Samsung has done this, <a href="http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9131684/Full_disk_encryption_comes_to_SSDs_for_mobile_devices_laptops" rel="nofollow">http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9131684/Full_disk_enc...</a>, but I cant find the market ready product.

If you don't backup your entire drive, it's still useful to know which files were on it. I have launchagent (OS X cron equiv) dumping a full file listing on schedule.