Stolen Coins -Adelaide

[trout]

Since the house was ransacked, the burglar may have known the coins were there and had a plan to dispose of them once he obtained them.-John

Mmmmm... If you've ever been burgled, you know what 'ransacked' really means. We came home from work late one night to find the front door open, the back window smashed and EVERYthing opened, tipped out, ripped, trampled, wrecked or otherwise 'searched'. They found a stash of notes, some jewellery, and a few bits and pieces of electronics (but stupidly left critical bits like power supplies behind.. real geniuses) yet left more valuable things behind. The scene looked like one of those news reports of a tornado or tsunami aftermath. These clowns are no professionals, and often leave a wide swathe of destruction that far exceeds the value of what they take.

Yes, it may have been a targetted hit, but probability says DFI's are far more likely perpetrators.

Which of course is of interest to all of us. As Goldy says, high value items should be well secured. A bank vault may be worth the expense. Or a decent safe that can't just be picked up and walked out with. Or other carefully-considered alternatives. But whatever you do, you need a plan, because chances are pretty good of being a victim SOMEtime in your lifetime.

As for me, the high-value items are secure, while the run-of-the-mill stuff would need a forklift to remove, so I'll take my chances for now.

I have been robbed once, they trashed the place but I found out who did it within 3hrs.
I gave the culprits an absolute flogging and recovered all ms stuff.
I then called the cops.
Unfortunately I got charged with assault and it cost me $500 but I consider this money well spent because I got the ratbags charged with burglary and got restitution for the damage they caused.

[markn]

I'm really hoping that the owner documented the collection well and has lots of pics and a list to share with us. (Hopefully one of the Adelaide crew will know the owner and find out).

We know whose coins they were.  We have no idea if they were documented or not.  There's a very limited number of places you could dispose of them in Adelaide and I'd suggest all of those outlets have been informed by now.  When we were in Melbourne on Friday the shops there already knew of the theft.

[Basil]

I played golf with a guy from the Gold Coast who lost several Gold coins in a robbery a few years back,he had them stashed in an old printer that was worth nothing and was very suspicious on how they found them as no thief would walk down the street with a printer under the arm.All his neighbours knew he traded in Coins so suspects one of them was in his house with a metal detector of some kind whilst he was out on his weekly game of golf.

[Goldseeker]

That is one good reason why every coin in my collection, and I MEAN every coin, is scanned and the picture is stored on my computer and a second hard drive.

If I get robbed, then the hard drives will be released and the scans therein.

[robbiegal]

thieves can be very smart
one of the coin club guys here was robbed
but all of his RAM products in boxes remained in their respective place , so no report done
some time later he goes to get a ram coin
all of the boxes had been emptied and neatly put back into place

another lady at work had for example, the camera case still in place,
again, some time later goes to use the camera
case is empty
and the beggar's had taken her second set of car keys
came back two weeks later during the night and drove off in  the family wagon!
interstate in no time (which in the ACT only takes about 20 minutes)

[Coins from Vending]

That is one good reason why every coin in my collection, and I MEAN every coin, is scanned and the picture is stored on my computer and a second hard drive.

If I get robbed, then the hard drives will be released and the scans therein.

Having lost 10s of thousand of surfing photos on external hard drives, I would suggest that these files be backed up to an online storage site that way you have the drives and the storage site has the images as well.

[coxspau]

Would the security of online storage sites need to be called into question?

Without trying to provoke a fearful view of online storage, I am simply asking to test the views of online storage security.

[Goldseeker]

My second hard drive is with my insurance company and it is exchanged every year.

[Fulvio]

Would the security of online storage sites need to be called into question?

Without trying to provoke a fearful view of online storage, I am simply asking to test the views of online storage security.

Excellent points, both of you. Security is a double-edged sword. There is the security of keeping prying eyes out of your lepidopteran porn, then there is the security of not having your prized collection of irreplaceable bagel recipes go *poof* in the night.

Both sides of the same coin. The more you secure something from tampering, the more you risk securing it so well you'll never see it again. Been there, done that. I used a bunch of DAT drives to back up my networks religiously many years ago. It was all automated and running like clockwork. When the inevitable crash came, I discovered I'd committed years of incremental backups to write-only tapes. Never did recover a single file! *cry*

So step one has to be to decide what level and type of security you want. The reason I host my own pics is that I control the site, and its not going to suddenly vanish in the dead of night. Nor is inappropriate identifying detail going to show up in every search for any number of keywords. Plus, I maintain multiple copies of everything on my own local servers, and one of these days I'll go the extra step and install a Level 5 RAID, if I can find one that fits my requirements for cost and performance.

In "proper" computer centres, we used multiple generations of files. Each run would produce a new "son" generation, which would go to offsite backup, joining the "father" and "grandfather", while the "great-grandfather" would return to the library for eventual recycling. This works with cards, tapes, floppies, hard drives, DVD's or any other medium you care to use. At any moment you risk only the latest updates, or at worst a day or two further back. We once had to lease a Learjet to fly a full backup dataset to Canberra to meet a critical deadline after a catastrophic failure, and it was all done overnight working from the backups.

In more current, home environments, Apple's Time Machine works sort of along similar lines. Every change you make creates a new generation, and you can roll back changes to any given point in a file's history. And of course the files or entire drive can be backed up onto another set of media or into the cloud. There are other alternatives as well, which work similarly.

Now, as to the other side of the coin, not providing the scumbags with a shopping list.. that's more a matter of applying common sense. Don't put up a page listing your address, appointments and travel itinerary. Don't show pics of your neat hidden stash under the doggie bed. In short, don't do anything that will give the crims a reason to come knocking. Pics of coins are OK, but don't geo-tag them. And if you're using the cloud simply as a backup, by all means compress pics into archives, and give them funky names. If you happen to use MacOSX, there is a neat trick where you can turn a folder into an application, simply by appending .app to its filename. The reverse works too, so you could for example turn Excel.app into a folder named Excel, add files inside it, and turn it back into an application. As long as you don't tamper with its original contents, it will work as advertised, but also act as a hidden vault. (This trick *might* work with Windoze too, but would involve a bit of registry voodoo, and that stuff really scares me)

Think of it all as you would your security doors.. you want to keep the scum out, but you don't want to die looking for a key in a burning house, do you?

[markn]

We had a power failure/surge here about a week and a half ago.  It killed some network components and our Mac server.  Thankfully I am paranoid about backups and we had multiple backups around the place.  PPH took about 30 minutes to catch up on work that she'd lost and I lost the entire weekend building a new backup computer and diagnosing all of the problems.  I'm still not done as the Mac is back from the repair shop and needs inserting back in the network.  Moral of the story is back everything up, and back it up again, and have multiple copies of your backups in different locations.  Oh, and make sure that ALL your computer equipment is plugged into a UPS or surge protected plug.  Even that crappy little $50 network switch that zapped everything it was connected to when the power surge hit because I hadn't plugged it into the right socket.

[enworb]

I feel very sorry for David. The few times he talked to me about his collection he was always very excited and it seemed like he felt very accomplished with it. Id be devastated as im sure most of us would be.

[Fulvio]

I feel very sorry for David. The few times he talked to me about his collection he was always very excited and it seemed like he felt very accomplished with it. Id be devastated as im sure most of us would be.

Indeed. Its a horrible feeling at the best of times. Even if nothing goes missing, just knowing someone has invaded your space makes you feel sick. The loss itself is generally secondary, especially if its common junk covered by insurance. Don't suppose he was covered at least?

[enworb]

I have heard that none of it was insured. Hopefully I heard wrong...

[Robster]

If that is correct it is even more devastating.! Hate to think where they will end up.! :dodgy:

[Basil]

Just on back-ups,i worked in the early 1970's for a major Bank on Honeywell mainframes,in those days a magnetic tape copy of the days transactions was picked up by a cloak/dagger type security Co. and taken to a secure location,none of us who worked there or the State managers knew where it was which to my way of thinking created more problems than it may have solved in the event of a major drama.
These days encrypted data is sent daily to some huge data storeage facility in the Nevada desert so even if there is a Nuclear War the Oz. Banks are going to be after us for interest & fees.