Adeona is an open source system for tracking the location of your lost or stolen laptop. You install the Adeona software on your laptop and forget about it - until your laptop goes missing. Then using the retrieval software, you can locate your laptop (assuming it has connected to the Internet since it was lost or stolen) and provide the retrieved information to the proper authorities. Adeona works on Windows, OS X and Linux.
This tutorial will guide you through using Adeona to recover a lost or stolen laptop. Do not attempt to physically recover the laptop yourself.
- First, and most importantly, download and install Adeona.
- The Adoena installation is very straight forward (full OS X instructions here, full Windows instructions here, full Linux instructions here). Once installed, make note of the message stating where your retrieval credential file is stored. This is the file you’ll want to back up to a remote location (USB drive, email it to your Gmail account etc).
- Typically it’s saved to your desktop.
- If your laptop gets lost or stolen, copy your backup of the retrieval file (.ost) to another computer.
- Install the Adeona Recovery program on that other computer. Launch it after the installation.
- Click Next on the first screen.
- You’ll be prompted to select your retrieval file. Navigate to it, select it and click Open.
- Decide how far back you want to search - the default is two days. If your laptop was lost or stolen less than two days ago, you’ll probably want to specify a shorter time period.
- No matter how far back you decided to search, you’ll want to find all the locations that your laptop has been. Select Find all and click Next.
- Enter your Adeona password, and once again click Next.
- Click Next (last time, I promise).
- Adeona will now connect to the storage servers and retrieve the recovery information. This can take a while.
- When the process has completed, you’ll see a Press any key to continue . . . message. Press any key to close the window.
- And now click Close.
- Locate the adeonaretrieval folder on your desktop. Open it.
- Inside that folder, open the adeona_retrieve_results.txt file.
- This is the file that contains all the information about where your laptop has been.
Slowly scroll down the text file and locate the first instance of the info: ==== START STATE RETRIEVE ===== line. Below it you’ll find the most recent information on where your laptop has been. The line info: state updatetime: tells you the last time your laptop sent information to the Adeona server. The external IP: line states the IP address that your laptop was using. If your laptop was using a wireless connection, the access point: will also be listed. This is the information that you’ll want the authorities to have. Again, do not attempt to recover the laptop yourself.
- You can use a tool like lookup-ip to find out information about the external IP address.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
This is simply too cool. I would freak out if I lost my laptop or computer some how. Too much info I can’t afford to lose. (note to self, backup more often!).
Hopefully who ever has your lost computer doesn’t wipe it clean. That’s probably what most of us would do.
Cool…I gave you a thumbs up!
It is hard for me to believe that a morron that steals my laptop would use my configuration(either linux or windows)… It would be simpler to do a fresh install than to hack my passwords. ( Yeah, Yeah… single user mode and stuff… And connet to the internet with a stolen computer? REally stupid.
As this is all software based it really depends on the thief not formating your disk before connecting to the internet…
And having someone with my logs from where I’m accessing… in todays days, the world is really insecure to let this information out… Someone can use it to steal or even kill me
lcabral,
Right. Obviously a computer savvy thief wouldn’t go online with your laptop. The average thief? Maybe not so computer savvy. They did STEAL your laptop after all, not the brightest thing to do.
“having someone with my logs from where I’m accessing…” - Um no. YOU have the logs from where THEY’RE accessing. Hence the whole creating a secure Adeona password - the logs are stored on the Adeona server, which can only be accessed if you have both the retrieval file and password that goes with it.
Adeona clearly isn’t going to recover every laptop that gets stolen. The thief will need to go online, and the police/authorities will need to understand how the info you provide them can help. But it does certainly increase your chances of the laptop being recovered.
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