Tools to Recover Lost or Stolen Devices

Posted: May 31, 2011

In today's world, we all use at least one portable electronic device to keep track of our business and/or personal lives. What happens to your business if you lose that device or worse, it's stolen?

Here are some tools that can help find or recover devices that are "missing" — from phones to cameras to laptops.

In today's world, we all use at least one portable electronic device to keep track of our business and/or personal lives. What happens to your business if you lose that device or worse, it's stolen?

Here are some tools that can help find or recover devices that are "missing" — from phones to cameras to laptops.

Locate a Missing iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch

If you have the latest generation iPhone (4), iPad (1 or 2) or iPod Touch (4th Generation) running iOS 4.2 you can use the "Find My iPhone" [caption id="attachment_8634" align="alignright"]© Texelart - Fotolia.com[/caption]feature for free. Otherwise, you'll have to pay a fee for MobileMe, which runs $99 per year, but also lets you take advantage of cloud storage. It comes with a 60 day free trial.

Find a Missing Android Phone

There are plenty of options for Android phone owners. One of the more popular apps is called Where's My Droid which is free and runs in the background. It allows you to find your phone even if it's on silent mode and won't ring. You simply text your phone with a preset "attention word" and the phone will turn the phone's volume up and begin ringing. You can also set an attention word that will send you the GPS location of the phone when it receives the word via text.

Track Down a Stolen Camera

There's a free service called Stolen Camera Finder that uses the EXIF ID to find photos taken with your missing camera. Not all cameras are supported, but you can find a list of those supported here. The idea is that every camera has a unique ID that it includes in the photo’s JPG file. Stolencamerafinder is collecting a database of those serial numbers that you can search against and possibly find a picture taken with your stolen camera. It's kind of a long shot but worth a try.

Retrieve a Missing Laptop

There are plenty of options for recovering lost or stolen laptops including Lojack, which costs $89.99 for three years, and claims to recover 3 out of 4 laptops. Another option is Gadegttrak, which starts at $34.95 a year for one computer and offers different protection options including iPhone (and iPad) and Android and Blackberry protection. Some laptops come loaded with recovery software in the BIOS which prevents the software from being circumvented by swapping hard drives.