Good data hygiene can save you if you ever lose your devices. Start here. |
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| Miguel Porlan for NYT Wirecutter |
Losing a phone or laptop can throw your life into chaos. But the good news is it only takes a little bit of preventative data cleanup — before anything goes missing — to turn what could have been a major personal catastrophe into a minor inconvenience. Below are a few small things you can do right now to protect your data should you ever lose your tech. Besides, they’re good habits to build even if you’re lucky and never lose anything at all. Let’s do some digital cleaning today, shall we?
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Turn on this simple iPhone feature. It makes it much harder for thieves to ruin your life. |
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| Michael Hession/NYT Wirecutter |
An incredibly easy step you can start with: Take a moment to turn on a feature called Stolen Device Protection. After you enable it, your iPhone will require additional authentication for the user to access some information. It will also prevent certain changes if it detects that it isn’t at a trusted location, like your house or workplace. (And for non-iPhone users: Google has made a similar feature, called Identity Check, available for some Android phones.)
How to turn Stolen Device Protection on→
Back up your important files to an external hard drive |
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| Marki Williams/NYT Wirecutter |
Our tech experts recommend backing up your important documents and photos to an external hard drive that you store in a safe location, so you can recover your files — even if your laptop is gone for good. Our top-pick external hard drive gives most people the best balance of price, speed, capacity, portability, and usability. And a bit of good news: Backing up your data is easy, and getting started takes only a few minutes.
The external hard drive we recommend→
Start using a good password manager |
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| Rozette Rago/NYT Wirecutter |
A password manager is an essential tool we recommend to improve your online security. It works by creating and autofilling unique passwords for all of your accounts, and in turn you need to remember and safeguard only one master password. Your data stays encrypted until the master password is entered, and you can deauthorize the device if it’s stolen or lost to remove the potential of your passwords being accessed altogether.
The best password manager we’ve tested→
One last thing: “I tried, and failed, to disappear from the internet” |
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| Miguel Porlan for NYT Wirecutter |
As a privacy journalist, writer Max Eddy has given all manner of advice on how to secure an online life. “But I’d never undertaken a project that extends the idea of privacy to its logical conclusion: by disappearing completely.” So he spent weeks attempting to scrub every trace of himself from the internet. Spoiler: Once your information is out there, removing it completely is almost impossible.
That being said, Max’s efforts to cleanse his online presence wasn’t a total wash. After a whole lot of scrubbing and scouring, “Googling my name is less terrifying than it used to be,” he says.
Max’s journey to erase his online life→
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Happy (digital) cleaning.
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