Laptop Computer Stolen from Hospital Room – Irreplaceable Photos GONE

Just a few days ago, here in Toronto, as reported in the Toronto Star,   a despicable crime was committed (not the first such crime of this type, this year), when a Laptop computer was stolen from a hospital room.

The story, more or less in chronological order, went something like this:

• Laptop stolen from hospital…
• Hospital theft suspect may be involved…
• Laptop theft suspect captured …
• Owner hopes for recovery of photos from stolen laptop – “A woman whose stolen laptop was recovered without its photos of her dead daughter will likely get them back, computer experts say.”

Kudos to the Toronto Police Service, who recovered the Laptop within a few days – only to find that the irreplaceable photos had been erased.

As well as newspaper coverage, this sad story received massive play on Toronto’s seven television stations. It was evident that the victim was extremely distraught over the loss of her dead daughter’s photographs.

While I had great sympathy for the Laptop owner, at the same time I was mystified that:

• No recovery software was installed on this machine; despite the fact that Laptops are at high risk for thief.

Recent survey results from the Ponemon Institute, indicates that more than 10,000 laptops are lost, or stolen, each week at U.S. airports alone, coupled with statistics which show that a laptop is stolen, not lost but stolen, every 53 seconds.

Free recovery applications are widely available on the Internet – see Download Prey – A Free Recovery Solution to a Lost or Stolen Laptop, here.

• The irreplaceable photos of the victim’s dead daughter were not backed up to another medium.

USB flash drives cost virtually nothing – prices range from less than $8 (2 GB), to under $30 (16 GB). That’s a lot of photo storage per dollar. A simple Windows Explorer right click menu command “Copy to folder”, would have copied the photos to a USB stick in seconds.

Worse however, was the realization that the Laptop Hard Drive was not backed up. This, despite the fact that that there are some very substantial free backup applications available for download on the Internet – see Free Paragon Backup and Recovery – Incremental Backup Included, here.

Finally, while I’m unsure as to the cost of recovery this woman faced, the newspaper story did mention a cost of $80 to $150, for a simple recovery operation such as this.

This expense could easily have been avoided if the victim had been aware, that free software is readily available on the Internet to effect photo recovery – see Recover Picture Files On Your Digital Camera Card, on regular guest writer Rick Robinette’s site What’s On My PC.

The recovery application Rick reviewed, Recuva, is capable of recovering photos from virtually any media – including Hard Drives.

I’m not trying to be a big “meanie” here but, it seems to me, that this woman was the architect of her own misfortune. A little pre-planning, particularly with a high risk item like a Laptop, could have saved her considerable distress. But, like too many computer users, her interest stopped with the on/off switch.

As is usual with mainstream media, the Toronto Star failed to grasp the significance of this event, and use it as a teaching tool so that other computer users could learn from the mistakes evident in this occurrence.

Perhaps, I expect too much.

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