This post has been sitting in my drafts for a while…

In May I spent two weeks in France where my rental car was broken into and my laptop and iPad were stolen. Despite being tech savvy and regularly working with my IT department on data security issues, my personal laptop hadn’t been backed up in a couple years. In fact, I had recently moved several years worth of photos onto it in order to organize them and then back them up. But I ran out of time. My life was on that laptop.

Yes, they say not to leave stuff visible in your car. But the trunk was too small to hold everything. We were also in a small town off the standard tourist path and it was Mother’s Day in France, so we let our guard down.

I can’t begin to explain the sick feeling that hit me like a punch in the gut, as I realized 1) someone had access to some intensely personal information on that laptop and 2) it was all gone and I no longer had access. I also feared insult would be added to the injury when I returned the rental car and was hit with the bill for the repairs (I had coverage through my credit card, but it’s a reimbursement type of coverage so I’d still have to go out of pocket). There also was the ordeal of filing a police report in a foreign country (thankfully, a local couple went out of their way to assist us, coming to the police department and translating – be nice to strangers, folks, because sometimes it comes back around).

Within 24 hours, I had calmed down. My laptop was password protected, so I realized the odds of someone accessing my data was limited (besides, it was a gaming computer, not a business one, so it didn’t look like it would have a ton of valuable data). I also realized that the thieves were likely looking to make a quick buck, which meant they would likely sell the laptop for scrap/spare parts or they would simply wipe the drive. It was an old laptop and I needed a new one anyway (although I wasn’t prepared to buy one yet). My iPad and some other items in my backpack still bothered me more – most particularly my Agent Scully Funko Pop which has traveled with me and been the subject of some interesting photos (and would cost me over $40 to replace).

The worst part was losing all the work I had done editing photographs from my prior trips. My entire Lightroom library was gone because it had only been backed up locally. On the positive, I still had the SD cards from my most recent trips and I was able to recover older trips from my old computer.

So, it was a hard lesson learned that I should have learned long ago – back up your computer regularly.