Mobile computing, security, and photography

I wanted to write about two applications I use heavily for work-related computing on the road, but which are also handy for photography. Right now I travel with a laptop purchased several years ago that for all intents and purposes I treat like a netbook. I only have the usual browsers, Microsoft Office, and a few other applications installed on it. Photo-related applications included BreezeBrowser Pro which is very nice for browsing, sorting and winnowing photos, and the free GIMP for doing basic editing.

More importantly, rather than storing anything locally on the machine for any length of time, I use LogMeIn Hamachi for a personal VPN that links together my office and home machines. I access shared folders on those machines, and leave most of my documents, media, and data there, to be accessed and worked with remotely over the VPN. Hamachi in my experience has been extremely robust, and folder sharing across the VPN works very smoothly in Vista and Windows 7. Folder sharing was more erratic under XP but I think that was a problem with XP, not Hamachi.

For photography, my workflow when I am on the road is to go out and take pictures (that is the most important, of course!), get back to the hotel and download to a local directory on the laptop, and then winnow the photos in BreezeSys. Usually I end up keeping about 5 to 10 percent of the photos I shoot. Once I have completed the review, I copy the survivors to a directory on my home machine that I am accessing remotely via the Hamachi VPN. Depending on how much time I have, I may also do some processing of the JPG in GIMP right on the laptop and post to Smugmug via Send to Smugmug. More commonly, I accumulate the photos on the home machine and then when I am back home, do RAW conversion with Adobe Lightroom, and geotagg with Robogeo. The home machine has automated backup.

If I need to access any applications I don't have installed on my laptop, for example, Lightroom, I do that via Windows Remote Desktop over the encrypted Hamachi VPN connection.

Following this process, I am fairly well insulated against the risk that I might lose photos or for that matter important data or documents if my laptop is stolen or damaged while I am on the road. Also by not keeping anything locally, the risk of media, data, or documents being viewed surreptitiously by someone with access to my laptop is somewhat reduced. Obviously I am not too worried about anyone seeing my photos, but I do want to protect my work-related documents and data.

The end result is that my laptop, which was quite expensive when I bought it, is acting as little more than a thin client.

For added safety, I have taken two additional precautions. One which I highly recommend for any laptop is that I have encrypted the hard drive with TrueCrypt, which is a free, open-source encryption utility. It allows for encryption of an entire drive, requiring a password to boot. This is very nice since it means that if your laptop is stolen, whoever has it will find it almost impossible to access anything on the drive, unless they also have you along with the laptop and can persuade you to give up the password. It should also be protection against drive cloning, for example, if you leave your laptop in the hotel and while you are out on the town, someone from the security services comes in and gets your laptop and pops the drive out and clones it using a purpose-built device they have brought with them and then replaces it, when they get the cloned drive back to their offices, it shouldn't be very useful to them. You can also encrypt removable storage, external hard drives and so forth with TrueCrypt.

For deleting files permanently on the laptop, I use Eraser, an open-source data removal utility. Remember that when you delete files there are still traces left on the hard drive, and a utility like Eraser should wipe them out completely.

All this emphasis on security is certainly worthwhile if you use your laptop for work and have any sensitive documents or data on it, but I suppose it may sound like overkill if all you are doing with your laptop is storing photos while travelling. But it is worthwhile. Certainly if you are a commercial photographer or a very serious amateur you should take measures to protect your work. But even if you all you are doing with your laptop is piling up vacation photos, I think it is worth doing. If your laptop is stolen or lost, do you really want complete strangers poring through your family photos?