Do you travel with laptop or not?

I normally don't if it's only for a week. I think you need a break from your computer but if it's for a longer period I will take it with me.

 

Nah, I usually don't. It takes A LOT of place, really. And I hate carrying anything heavy. It's just the way I am. Fortunately, we all have smartphones nowadays. They are really smart and can operate as good as laptops do.

 

Yes, that is correct. It's kind of like having a CD player, but missing the CDs, or certain discs from a collection when needing the entire discography to be able to play music for someone. They will know of the discs that are there (if you leave them or make those available publicly), but they cannot play music if they cannot possess the discs or aren't sure what to look for tto fill in the spaces for the missing music before playing it all in front of a live audience.

With your data, it is even more serious because unlike a CD music discography where the parts of the music that one has can still be played for an audience at least a little, the data being readable or able to be used may not be the case.

You don't always have to be a programmer to do this correctly, and there are programs which can help you to do this in different ways, but it always helps if you are a programmer because you can do special things that are not available to use or exist by 3rd party or premade solutions, are able to rebuild and troubleshoot custom solutions you may make for yourself in the event that you ever need to, and most importantly you can make solutions that are unique and are not known to anyone else. When hackers and forensics try to retrieve data from a system, they have to know what kind of system they are doing this with, how the hardware works to do so, and the file formats and information after they've performed raw physical recovery. Even if they can physically recover data for someone, being able to know what that data is (or ho to "hear" and understand the music if it were a CD) is the net step. If they cannot do that, then the recovered data might as well be a lost CD because n one can hear it correctly when trying to decipher it.

The only thing better than scrambling data is distributing it across mediums, so that even if they manage to get and decrypt portions of the original data, there will be gaps between it that make it unusable or unreadable to them even still. The only thing better than that is to interleave it a few bytes at a time to where they wouldn't be able to tell which ones go where between 2 or more mediums. You would, but they wouldn't. They would need you to do it for them because it would take them dozens or maybe hundreds of years to do so manually depending on how much data there is, the algorithm used for this, and how many mediums there are that they can't account for or map.

Most users won't have to go that far and standard 3rd party tools are enough for them like Bitlocker and TruCrypt. If you need to go beyond that though, consider this.

 

A very informative response as always. Thanks for replying in a layman's term fashion. I didn't know or even heard about this data scrambling / interleaving across different systems before. So is it like having a RAID 0 but instead of having data striped to multiple hard drives, data is striped to systems? As a start, I'll try those programs and see what I can do. I will definitely go back to this in the future

 

I never use it on the actual vacation but I always take my computer with me. I find it very useful on the plane. It makes the trip go by a lot faster. If you like to play games and are looking for ones to play for hours, like when traveling try Sims! They have 2-4 with many expansion packs and work on every computer. You don't need quality graphics or high RAM or anything.

 

My pleasure. Yes, it's somewhat like using a RAID 6 distribution, but through a drive configuration that does not require the drives to be connected or physically a part of the system and each parity sequence of bits or bytes on the drive can be encrypted by a known or (preferably) unknown standard as long as it is fast enough to recover the data over a virtual controller. While reading and writing at a certain speed, a wait state has to be introduced for file I/O to ensure and account for any delay if trying to do it over one or more networks. You might say it's the next step (people could call it RAID 7), but there's several different ways of doing this, so it's probably going to see as many sequels and revisions as a Fast and Furious movie over time if more start to do this.

 

Yes, absolutely. I need my laptop for so many different things. Things that would drive me crazy if had to do them on my phone. I even end up using my laptop in places, &a for things I had never thought of. Traveling with my laptop is a must, for both business & pleasure.

 

Yes, to do anything related to banking like paying my credit cards or checking my bank account. I don't like nor trust mobile banking apps and I don't feel secure using a shared computer in one of those office spaces from hotels to access my bank. I know this is quite dumb since the network itself that I am going to use is not going to be secure but at least I can trust my laptop to be free of key loggers and other malware.

For everything else I am quite happy using a shared computer since it is always something trivial like checking an address or making a dinner reservation.

 

I do own a smartphone so trying to avoid traveling with laptop. It can be damaging to the laptop itself and also these kind of gadgets can be quite heavy on the long run.

 

I don't travel a huge amount these days but back in the day I traveled with my notebook a lot. If my motel had wi-fi I was a happy gal. When I went to the Philippines several years ago, I visited internet cafes a lot, and discovered that it's really best to have your own device with you to keep from getting viruses in every peripheral device you use. I came home with a virus in my card reader and managed to infect my home computer. Luckily it was something easily discovered by my anti-virus program and I was able to get rid of it, but to this day I won't put that card reader into any computer. If you must compute while on vacation, definitely take your own device with you.

 

Yes I do travel with my laptop because my job is strictly internet based and I like to do some work even on holiday to stay in a good shape. That is the only thing I am using it actually. Okay, it depends on the vacation type but usually I just do some work, maybe watch some TV shows while resting on the beach and that is it. I have a problem with internet connection though. Wifi is not very good in some places and I need a stable connection so I travel with that mobile internet connected on the laptop but my experience with it is just terrible.

 

I am always carrying around my Macbook Pro everywhere I am traveling. My backpack has a slot perfect for it and I never know when I need to pull it out whether I'm in class or I have to do work real quick. Also, it helps to have my entire iTunes library on there.

 

I've been thinking about traveling with a laptop, when I go explore the different parts of Europe. I really don't want to let go of my video games and internet connection, so I am seriously considering getting a good gaming laptop and taking it with me to wherever I want to go, just so I could still have the luxuries of home while I am staying from inn to inn and eating food from the different parts of the world. It sounds expensive, I know, but I think it will be worth it in the end.

 

I have a half decent PC, so having a laptop for travelling helps. Especially on them 8 hour+ flights. I mainly use it for keeping up with work and, as I'm into fanfic, I write some fan fictions as well. It's so much easier to type and browse on a large screen then on my phone

 

Actually it depends on what kind of trip.
When my whole family drove from east coast to west coast (in the US) for fun along the way, I brought my laptop with me since it was a trip of 3+ weeks. However, that was back in 2007 when I had no mobile phone nor tablet. So the laptop was the only means for me to check email, browse the web, and do some light gaming on occasion.

When I went to shorter trips of only a few days, I do not bring my laptop at all. Especially these days when you can do light computing on your mobile phone and tablet, there is no need to bring along the laptop unless it is for work or study.

Actually it reminds me that one time we went to a river hiking trip. We had gathered about 30+ people for the trip. One of the girls who just broke up with her boyfriend, and she thought it was a trip for relaxing so she signed up for it. And she brought her laptop for "checking email". She was stunned when we arrived at the middle of nowhere. In the mountains, with no cellphone signal at all. We had to walk in the river, and climbed a few waterfalls... poor girl was crying half the way...

Laptop is ok for trips if you stay in the hotel room. Do not bring it if it is a camping trip or hiking trip. Then again, for me unless it is a trip longer than 3~4 days, I will just be happy enough with my phone and maybe my tablet.