Theft mitigation

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I didn't realize how ill-prepared I was to have my wallet stolen until it happened in Lisbon. I had to rely on Mike and Jacob to pay for everything for the rest of the Europe trip. Who knows what would have happened if I had been traveling by myself.

Since then, I've tried to have contingency plans for things being stolen: wallet, backpack, passport, laptop, cell phone. Ideally I'd be able to keep traveling after a theft, or at least be able to get home without it being too much of a hassle.

An important part of these contingency plans is to have digital copies of important stuff. Before I go somewhere, I take pictures of my passport, driver's license, credit cards, prescription medications, etc. I copy the pictures to an encrypted drive image (fairly easy to do with MacOS) and copy the drive image to the cloud, my laptop, and a tiny USB flash drive that I carry around in my pocket when I'm traveling. Then I delete the photos from my phone. It's more important that the data is secure, rather than easy to access. I won't have to access the data at all if nothing gets stolen.

Contingency plans:

Wallet: I keep an extra debit card and some cash hidden in my backpack. I should be able to cancel any stolen cards in a hurry, thanks to the digital photos I have of them.

Backpack: It should be easy to buy new clothes and toiletries. If I have any prescription medications, I can hopefully use my digital photos to get them refilled at a local pharmacy.

Passport: This one is tricky, but at least I'll have digital photos of the passport.

Laptop: I back up my laptop to the USB drive that I carry in my pocket. (Which is encrypted, of course.) If I need a laptop, I can buy a new one and restore it from the USB drive.

Cell phone: I back up my cell phone to my laptop. I can buy a new phone and restore it from the laptop.

I suppose a lot of people back up their laptops and cell phones to the cloud these days, but it's not that much extra trouble to back them up locally. Plus, you might not always have the best wifi connection, if you need to access data in the cloud.

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