Sooner or later your laptop will spontaneously combust or get left on a train. Work on the basis that this could happen at any moment.

  • Store your actual work in a central location (company server or cloud) rather than having the only copy on your computer. This also goes for any important data that you have collected.

  • Ensure that you can recreate your machine with the minimum of fuss. I have had complete laptop failures twice, but thanks to the magic of Apple’s Time Machine I could just buy a new computer, plug in my backup disk and in a few hours I had a working computer with all my software, settings and data restored.