Years of pious preaching came to a head for me last week.

Since I started doing this ("this,” of course, being this whole tech journalism lark) my cohorts and I have been extolling the need for creating computer back ups. To create them regularly, to deal with them predictably (e.g. every evening before shutting down and a full back up once a week), to store them safely and securely and to tell all your friends to do the same.

Well, dear reader, I have sinned. I have been hypocritical in my backup routine for my laptop. More specifically, my complete lack of any sort of back up routine for said laptop.

My car was stolen recently. In the back, a bunch of stuff of varying importance. One of my guitars, a hiking daypack I particularly liked, my electric razor and, of course, a laptop; the ASUS Eee PC that we reviewed last month. The car was recovered by Hamilton, ON’s finest and as I write this, we’re waiting for the (long string of colourful expletives) insurance company to go appraise the damage before we can go pick it up. I’m hopeful that some of my clothes and such will still be in there, but I’m not holding out a lot of hope for the laptop. Or the guitar, for that matter.

The laptop wasn’t actually mine; it was due to be sent back to the company that loaned it to me this week. That said, it had become an important part of my “digital lifestyle” and, owing to its tiny footprint and low weight, it accompanied me just about everywhere. The laptop can be replaced without much of an issue; it’s not overly expensive and, once I pay out for the loaner that was lost, I intend to buy a new one. However, the data on that laptop would theoretically hold more value than the thing itself. Without a back up – other than the 1GB SD card that was inserted in to the card slot for off-saving work and which, along with the laptop, is now gone – I might have been out a lot of personal and professional data of varying import.

The laptop gave me access to all my documents both personal and professional. Pictures, music, videos, email addresses, phone numbers and so on.

While I’m sorry to see the laptop go, I’m not too worried about the data it held data. In fact, there wasn’t really much in the way of data on the laptop…

It’s an emerging concept that’s been dubbed “cloud computing.” Rather than storing files locally on your PC, everything is stored online and accessed via any PC you use. Instead of navigating to the familiar “My Documents” folder to email the latest sales figures or going to “My Pictures” to browse through photos from last month’s vacation, everything happens within the data “cloud.” You boot up a PC, open a Web browser, navigate to your online workspace and go. I use a Firefox extension called Speed Dial that gives me one-click access to the sites I use every day. It’s modeled after the like-titled feature in the Opera browser and I find it to be an incredibly useful way of keeping all my oft-used online resources close at hand.

The theft, of course, does open up some security concerns. Few of the documents I work with are sensitive and I don’t keep them on my PC. Instead, I use an encrypted USB key and / or work straight from folders on the office network. When the laptop fell in to the wrong hands, one of my first thoughts was that I needed to get online ASAP to change all my passwords. I had a couple of them saved in the (password-protected) Firefox password manager. While I doubt they would have been cracked (or if they were, that whoever cracked them would particularly care to read about the minutiae that goes in to putting together HUB: The Computer Paper), I created an entirely new string of passwords – easy to remember but tough to crack phonetic, phrase-based ones substituting numbers and characters for letters and words with a few leading and trailing characters to be safe.

Like I said, I’m sad to see the little lappy go, but I’m secure in the knowledge that there’s nothing on there that a) can’t be easily and quickly replaced and b) there’s nothing sensitive, incriminating or otherwise dangerous being passed from hand to hand in Hamilton’s seedy criminal underbelly.

So, while we’re still waiting to find out just what (if anything) remains in the trunk of our once errant auto, at least my data is safe and still accessible. With all the stuff that has to be endured when dealing with an insurance company that seems hell bent on making decidedly unlike a good neighbour experience as possible, that’s no small relief.