It has happened to us once or twice in our digital lives when we've lost a device or a gadget. We'd maybe throw a fit for losing something that took very long to decide on and even longer to acquire. But more importantly aside from all the tangible things, is our precious data inside. I don't know about you, but, I personally would lose sleep over data rather than on replaceable hardware.

The US Department of Veterans Affairs learned this the hard way, when a thief broke in a department analyst who took his laptop home unauthorized, took the laptop and ran away with social-security numbers, birth dates, and other personal information for more than 26 million veterans and spouses, as well as 2 million active military, National Guard, and Reserves personnel.

Data inside laptops are easy targets because the password and encryption mechanisms that come with these devices are mostly weak. Tracking system companies like Computrace, are giving laptop owners three options when it comes to recovering and protecting their data - tracking software, encryption and "kill" switches.

Tracking by Computrace is done with each machine reporting to the company server once a day via internet. If the computer is reported stolen it will prompt the machine to report every 15 minutes until the IP address can be pinned down to a street address for the police to make an arrest. Even if the machine was kept offline, it can't dodge every Wi-Fi network there is. Absolute Software has placed the instructions for contacting Computrace into the basic input-output system (BIOS) of recent Hewlett-Packard, Gateway, Lenovo, Dell, and Fujitsu laptops, so that even reinstalling the operating system will not stop the machines from reporting in. It will cost $50 per month per machine.

You might be thinking that's only going to recover your laptop. But what about the data? This is where encryption comes in. CyberAngel Security Solutions in Nashville, TN, combined tracking with an encryption scheme. Their software creates an encrypted partition on the hard drive, the thief will be able to use the machine even he didn't put in the correct password  but it will hide the encrypted partition from the user while sending alerts to the tracking service.

And the last option is the "kill" switch. This one is the last resort. Laptops equipped with kill switches report to a central server at intervals. But no tracking is attempted; instead, the purpose is to check whether a machine should start destroying its data files. Or if you just want to do a Mission Impossible and say that the data will self destruct in 5 seconds.

Deleting a file -- simply putting it into a trash can or recycle bin, is not sufficient, since the data is still on the disk. The Pentagon, for instance, requires three over-writes to expunge sensitive data. Beachhead's system, which starts at $129 per year, can be set to overwrite as many as eight times.