I'm about to do a trip in which the risk of computer being stolen is much higher than usual (train, car, let my bag with computer by friends of friends, and obviously I won't take my computer while I'm swimming in the sea etc.).
What I've done so far:
master password at boot (in Lenovo BIOS)
backups of my hard drive in different places (even in different cities, by my parent's, etc.)
But even if the master password blocks the computer from booting, the hard drive can be easily removed from a Lenovo, and then all my data could be easily taken.
What other options are there?
encryption: I was thinking about this, but would this require to rewrite all the 650GB of data of my 1TB SSD ? This would probably be very long...
geolocalization: have a software running in background sending a ping with IP and approximate location to a server?
or even a keylogger that sends data to a server, so that if it gets stolen, I can have information? or even a software that would connect to my server once every minute from which I could send a "Wipe everything" signal in case of computer being stolen? (ok this looks crazy, but I have been stolen recently -- not a computer -- that's why I want to prevent it to happen again).
I'm mostly on Windows 7 x64 bit, but I sometimes boot on Linux, and access to the D:\ from Linux.
Note: this question is close, but doesn't exactly address all the concerns here.
Answer
Use full disk encryption, such as BitLocker (Windows 7 Ultimate) or TrueCrypt/VeraCrypt. Encrypting your existing storage will take a while, but with modern CPUs and SSDs it shouldn't take more than a few hours (limiting factor likely being how fast your SSD can write).
In case your laptop gets lost, your data will be safe assuming your system is in locked state (powered off).
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