Five tips for keeping your data safe while traveling

Traveling puts your data at higher risk than normal - follow these five tips to keep it safe:

TIP ONE: Encrypt your entire hard disk with TrueCrypt

Before worrying about protecting your data you should worry about is that it doesn't get stolen. As important as getting your data back is ensuring it doesn't fall in to the wrong hands. Fortunately, there is an easy, simple, quick, highly secure and free solution to this problem: TrueCrypt. This encrypts your hard drive (or solid state disk) and decrypts it on the fly using military grade encryption.

There are still risks associated with using this service - if your laptop is kept running the data isn't safe, but while your laptop is switched off your data is nearly 100% secure.

TIP TWO: Use online backup for travelers

There are many different backup destinations you can use for your data. External hard disks are an good location to store large amounts of data usually, but while traveling it means one more thing to carry and, if your laptop is stolen, it is likely that all other devices you are carrying with it will be stolen.

TIP THREE: Use another online backup service to back up extra important data and data you use regularly

It's possible not only to lose data on your hard disks while traveling, but also on your backup service. It could silently fail (back up but no), fail at the same time as you lose your laptop (it happened to

carbonite customers).

All of this is unlikely - but still justifies storing your extra-valuable data in a separate and unrelated location.

This needn't cost any extra, however - there are plenty of free online backup services which provide anything up to 7GB of storage.

TIP THREE: Sync your phone, camera, ebook reader with your laptop regularly

In all likelihood, if you have a laptop stolen, it will be stolen along with all of your other electronic equipment. This means potentially losing ebooks, photos, phone contacts and more.

Rather than finding a solution for each individual device, it is probably easier to use whatever it is you use to back up

TIP FOUR: Use LastPass to store your website passwords

This is another extremely useful, highly secure and free service. It synchronizes your passwords, securely, among every browser (internet explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Safari) using

client only key encryption. It means that instead of remembering all of your passwords (unviable if you use hundreds), using some sort of 'system' (insecure, tricky and prone to failure) and using the same one on all websites you can use a different one on each website and only have to remember the master password.

Additionally, you can log in to the website (for example at an Internet cafe) to look up passwords.

TIP FIVE: Don't travel with an expensive laptop - bring cheaper looking, or beaten up laptop

A more expensive laptop is nice, but best left at home. High value laptops (especially Apple products) are magnets for thieves.