What about a second hand MBA?
A bit part of the reason I am thinking along this path is because I would prefer to take an inexpensive machine with me where I won’t worry about getting scratched, or damaged, or lost. Another advantage with sticking to macOS is, from what I know, there aren’t any fakes or compromised units - so if you did lose one you could purchase a new replacement and be relatively confident it has not been hampered with..
I rode a small-ish distance over a week, about 360km, from southwest france to the mediterranean sea, then went south along the sea until I crossed to spain ! I would have liked to prepare a bit better, lacked a bit of time, and needed to do exercises for a knee for two months after that - still totally worth it;
Re : encryption and backup, I had the canonical experience in 2022 : 3 hour long meeting, super productive, took a lot of notes and user feedback. We go for lunch with the client team, someone in the street grabs my bag and runs. No more notes and no more laptop. The laptop was fully encrypted but I thought that I would sync the notes at the end of the day at the hotel. My paper notes were gone too since they were in the bag.
Now when I’m travelling I constantly sync my work and only take with me what I’m okay with losing.
Over the years, as much of my career has been in professional services in one form or another, I’ve done a fair amount of travel carrying computing equipment. There have been stretches for several years running where I’d be on the road during the weekdays and then back home for the weekend. In fact, I just got off a plane ~45 minutes ago, will spend ~6 hours here at home, and then will be back at the airport to jump an early morning flight for another week away in a different place.
I think there’s a lot to this. I don’t take huge special precautions just because I’m travelling. I do take different kinds of precautions based on the particular sensitivity of information I might be carrying around on my travel laptops (my main working computer is a very stationary desktop workstation). Most of my travelling is project management/business analysis with limited secret-sauce/disclosure-sensitive information needing to be with me. So the basic thing I’m typically guarding against isn’t so much disclosure as much as it is simply losing access to my needed work products. So I use MFA everywhere possible, I tend to avoid biometric access, I encrypt data a rest (basic effort, not heroic efforts), and ensure that I’m syncing my data to a sufficiently trusted cloud service. Crossing borders, I will typically strip information down to bear minimum required for the trip just because those have a higher risk of highly invasive searches. With good encryption and access to various online storage options… there’s usually a way not to carry data on-device today.
There have been times where I have carried more sensitive information which did carry real disclosure risk where I took extra precautions, but I took those on my non-travelling systems as well because the travel aspect didn’t matter: the information determined my security needs overall.
Finally, I did have a work laptop stolen once from the back office of a large retail store I was travelling to help open. We actually ended up getting it back because I was working in a pretty secure back office (under security cameras, which did catch the act) and the laptop had some very specialized and very, very expensive networking gear (at least for the time) installed into it which apparently was enough to elevate the chargeable offense enough to really pursue. Perhaps the irony is that tomorrow’s trip is taking me back to the city where that happened for the first time since that trip… ~30 years ago :-).
My home/away technical setup:
If my laptop or desktop is stolen/destroyed in a fire it’s fine.
If I’m robbed and lose my Yubikey and my phone I have the other one Yubikey in the office.
Being searched at borders is not something I’ve chosen to defend against so far. You could zero-wipe devices before crossing, but I’m less concerned with this threat.
We’re on the road a few months per year, all within the US, sometimes by road, sometimes by air. Our travel locations are often off-grid, and we’ve spent a fair amount of time tweaking the setup.
Key tools:
What makes it work for me: the ‘desktop layout’ is the same no matter the location. Dual-screen monitor, mechanical keyboard, screens raised to eye level.
In a house, the ‘monitor stand’ is often a cardboard box.
In the van, the ‘monitor stand’ is some built-in shelves. A bosun’s chair works great and packs small. A 300aH LFP battery is enough to go about a week between recharges.
Everything is synced to a cheap VPS in a datacenter. Sensitive data is encrypted with Yubikey 2FA.
Protip: practice! Take your mobile setup across town for an afternoon and see how it works.
I recommend reading up on Mullvad. They actually fight in courts for their customers. Proton seems a lost cause these days to me, they’re pushing their non-free tiers too aggressively for my taste, and I never believed the “we’re in Switzerland so nobody can come knocking on the door for your secrets” thing. And their free tiers are way too limiting to boot.
I think it’s way cheaper to rent a basic server or 2. I have been paying 9 euros a month with Dedibox and that gives me 1TB HDD. Having two makes sense, with a sync between them just in case one dies, and it will still be less than 20 euros a month.
I think working with a VPN is a risky move though, as you cannot do anything when the internet is bad or down, which happens more often than not. Working offline and syncing the changes regularly is more practical IMHO. I also had trouble in the past while working directly on files via SSH. It’s better to work on them locally and have an automatic sync everytime you save them.
Sounds amazing! Post pics (or in our Where do you live thread) if you feel like sharing 
For your knee you might want to look into home-made 24 hour bone broths (it’s what I’d turn to for any bone/joint issues, perhaps with some Kefir too).
Nightmare!!! I think you highlight an important issue too - that unfortunately tourists often stand out like a sore thumb and do get targeted by thieves in some popular destinations. We’ve all probably seen the viral videos of the woman who goes around tourist destinations in her country filming and shouting “PICK POCKET” whenever she sees one in action.
Definitely pays to be vigilant, and, as we’re all discussing in this thread, taking precautions.
You’re not on macOS but syncing the Notes app via iCloud is very handy - you can sync between phones/mac/iPad etc and if a device is lost or stolen those notes are still in the cloud.
Just be sure to turn on Advanced Data Protection (it’s criminal that it’s not on by default tbh!)
Thanks for sharing your story Steven! While it could have happened to anyone, I do feel there is an added risk to travellers because many thieves probably feel that when the person goes back home it will all be forgotten. Much better from their perspective to avoid robbing someone who lives there and who they may bump into again in future.
Let’s hope you don’t have a repeat on your return! I’ll keep my fingers crossed for ya 
+
I bookmarked a new VPN I saw on DT recently:
I wonder if it’s worth a look?
Personally I would not take the risk given the direction things are going, particularly if you are or work with people or an organisation who is outspoken against your govt or certain injustices in the world. They could use controversial laws just to spite/bully people (as they appear to have in the story I linked to above).
Ah nice! I’d love to do something like that one day!! Or just build a house out in the sticks somewhere. Here in Wales we have a One Planet scheme that lets you build in areas where you’d struggle to get planning permission otherwise, definitely going to look into that as well at some point (it seems very restrictive, shame it just wasn’t a little bit more flexible)
My only concern with this is that your data is at a location where anyone could come or go - which I think is fine for certain types of data but I wouldn’t want everything on there. Hence currently I think I would prefer using Remote Desktop.
My current thinking is to simply copy over what I need, work on it, then copy it back to my home machine when done or at regular intervals. For general notes I’d be happy to use iCloud syncing on the Notes app.
What do you mean by “anyone could come or go”? These servers are not more accessible than Apple’s and you seem to enjoy iCloud’s features without worrying about that. Also the computer that you let at home could be compromised or stolen even more easily. In any case, if you have sensitive data there you should store them encrypted.
