It was late March and a good day was about to go bad for Bridgette. A thief had broken into her home. No one was home, thank goodness, but the thief got away with several items including her iMac and her prized DSLR camera. The police dutifully took the report and assigned a detective to the case.

Little did the thief know that Bridgette's iMac had Backblaze Online Backup installed with the Locate-my-Computer feature set to “Mapping is On”. Using another computer, Bridgette simply used a browser to log into her Backblaze account. Once there she clicked on “Locate my Computer” and was presented with few simple guidelines,

1. Prepare a restore of her data,
2. Change her Backblaze account password and
3. Report the IP address of her stolen computer to the police.

She gave the police the IP Address information she collected, but was told that IP address tracking would take a few days as her ISP would have to provide the address of the thief.

But, Bridgette didn’t need to wait a few days. The Backblaze Locate-my-Computer feature also allowed Bridgette to “Map This”. When a stolen computer is connected to a Wi-Fi connection, “Map This” can show a street map along with the longitude and latitude of the location of the computer. When Bridgette gave this information the police they were able to quickly locate the thief without having to wait for the ISP to provide the location.

The police surprised the thief and recovered most of Bridgette’s property. After a bit of police department paperwork Bridgette was reunited with her DSLR camera and her iMac with Backblaze Online Backup.

The Locate-my-Computer feature is included in the Backblaze Online Backup service for no additional charge. To see if your system has the Locate-my-Computer feature activated just log in to your Backblaze account and see if the “Mapping is On” button is selected. We at Backblaze hope that you will never have to use the Locate-my-Computer feature, but if you do, please follow Bridgette’s lead and report the information received from Backblaze to law enforcement and let them find your system.