Boot from read only media, or mark your partitions read only. If you boot from CD you can copy-on-read to RAM to keep things snappy. Or PXE booting a Unix / Pla

Boot from read only media, or mark your partitions read only. If you boot from CD you can copy-on-read to RAM to keep things snappy. Or PXE booting a Unix / Plan9 workstation. I set my networks up so that I never rely on a terminal machine for storage. If I lose my laptop all I lose is my laptop. If I want a file to be stored permanently, I have to action it - Nautilis will mount remote file systems over ssh, I use that feature when creating & editing documents. I don't create them on the laptop. Other stuff gets mounted/linked in /dev/shm if needed I can flip ro/rw on partitions for doing updates or anything I really need to write to HD. I don't do it for privacy reasons, just data loss protection.