My personal laptop contains some stuff that I don’t want to lose control of, including the original Word documents for a few books. As such,I take precautions to protect that content.
My laptop runs Windows 7 Ultimate Edition. That includes a feature called BitLocker which can encrypt an entire disk. With a TPM 1.2 chip enabled in the BIOS, I enabled that, saving the recovery key to a USB stick. I want to keep that key safe – just in case. So I moved it from the USB stick to a folder on my laptop. That folder is replicated to my other machines using Live Mesh. That means I can access the recovery key for the laptop from anywhere using my Live ID.
My data is secure, and I can recover the laptop if something should go awry.