Laptop stolen or lost - what to do?

If your laptop has been stolen or lost, there are a few things to do. We'll show you what to do in the event of theft or loss.

Report the loss directly to the police. This is an important step, especially for insurance. If you acted with gross negligence during the theft or loss, you usually do not get any money from the insurance.
If your laptop has been stolen, the thief may try to read your hard drive. If he is not so curious, he will delete the data with a new Windows installation.
If the thief isn't one of the smartest of its kind, you may be lucky. If you have not password-protected your laptop, it may look over on your Facebook account. In parallel, you can determine the IP address of the login in the Facebook settings and hand it over to the police. However, this only works with a lot of luck.
Even if you have protected your computer with a password, you should change the passwords that you have saved in your browser. This will prevent further damage.

Prevent laptop theft

Back up your data regularly on external storage. For example, external hard drives, USB sticks or cloud storage such as Dropbox or Google Drive are available.
If sensitive data, such as trade secrets, is on your laptop, you should consider encrypting the hard drive. This means that the data can only be read by true professionals or authorities.
You can find several providers of tracking software on the Internet. This should make it possible to find the thief based on the IP address. In most cases, however, the computer is reinstalled directly, so that the software often fails to work.