Originally Posted by Kremmen
This touches upon one of the things I find most perverse about the search: It appears to be utterly pointless to me.
I can upload data from my home to the USA any time I want, before or after travel or, indeed, without ever visiting the US. I can upload securely, with zero chance of anyone searching the data. Yet some Customs guy can search my laptop. Clearly, the best thing to do is have no data (of any significance) on my laptop and upload data from elsewhere as needed.
As a matter of practicality for not-so-special (electronic) files, I increasingly store nothing on my computers and just use a "virtual harddrive" kind of set-up occassionally with an encrypted USB-drive.
This way if there is a physical theft, it's not as big a deal.