14 DAY TRIAL // A Swedish professor had a very unusual experience with a thief, who stole his laptop and then mailed an USB stick with the data back to him.
According to the local media, the victim, who wished to remain anonymous, is a professor at Umeå University in Sweden and a reputed expert in his field.
His backpack was taken from behind a door in his building's stairway, where he was forced to leave it for a few minutes due to unexpected circumstances.
Initially the professor felt most distressed about loosing a calendar he had in the bag along with the laptop, credit cards, keys and a few other things. It contained entries covering the past ten years.
Later, after reporting the theft and calling to cancel all cards, he found the backpack where he originally left it. All items were inside, except for the laptop and his library card.
Happy to have the calendar back, the professor made peace with loosing the computer and the files stored on it, which he hadn't backed up in a while.
However, a week after the incident, he received an USB stick via mail, which contained all documents from his laptop, including all his work from the last three years.
"Often when people lose their computers and cameras, it is understandably not the gadget itself that is the most important. The content is often irreplaceable," the lucky professor commented, according to The Local.
This is probably one of the very few cases when not using encryption actually paid off. Otherwise, the thief would have probably wiped the hard drive clean.
Of course, it doesn't mean that people should leave their data exposed in the hope that if it ever gets stolen it will be returned to them. That's not likely to happen.
Updated October 21, 2010: Corrected an error in the article where it improperly said that the USB stick was sent via email instead of regular mail.