It's summer. You pull into a park with your kids or dog, and a pile of hardware in the back. After a bit of frolicking, you return and find a hole in your car's window — and in your life. Your laptop, camera, phone and other electronics are missing. You may never see them again.

There's something you can do about that. But you have to do it now, while they're still in your possession.

I advocate a two-pronged approach to ensure that, even if your material possessions escape your grasp, you don't lose data while having a fighting chance of leading the police to the perpetrators.

On the prospective side, you can make sure you continuously back up your devices. On the recovery end, you can install software that reports its position back continuously or when marked as stolen. It's a good one-two punch.

I have advocated ad nauseam having some kind of multitiered backup strategy that combines on-site and off-site or Internet-based archives. For that purpose, I use Super Duper to create a clone of my main Mac, updated incrementally each night.

I simultaneously use CrashPlan to copy files across my network both to a central backup drive, and to CrashPlan+, an Internet-based archival system.

(SuperDuper is $27.95 with the incremental backup feature, and free for basic cloning. CrashPlan is free for local backups, and from $1.50 for limited single computer backups to $12 per month for an unlimited family plan. CrashPlan works with Mac and Windows.)

The advantage of using both these tools is that you benefit by being able to start up immediately from a bootable, backed-up volume made by Super Duper, then apply any incremental updates from CrashPlan.

CrashPlan can be set to continuously back up over the Internet (to your own computers or CrashPlan+) as soon as files are changed, and it will work over any network using a secure connection.

I also use Dropbox, available for Mac, Windows, iOS, and other platforms. As we've described before in this column, Dropbox anoints a folder on a computer to synchronize with other machines, as well as sharing nested folders in the Dropbox folder with other people.

All the writing and other work I do on a laptop I store in Dropbox, which then also continuously backs up and synchronizes whenever I have a network connection.

For my iOS devices, I plug them nightly into a shared machine at home. iTunes automatically performs backups of all user-created data, allowing a full recovery. With iOS 5, due later this year, over-the-air backups will be added.

I also have a strategy for cameras that keeps me from having to plug a memory card into a reader. Eye-Fi is a Wi-Fi-enabled Secure Digital card that automatically transfers photos over Wi-Fi networks to local machines or to online photo sharing services and social networks.

Whenever I take photos, as soon as I come home, I power the camera on and let the photos transfer to a local computer's hard drive, then import into iPhoto. (The card costs $49.99 for 4GB up to $99.99 for 8GB.)

All that data protection makes it possible to avoid losing work and memories even if the hardware disappears. But you can also take measures in advance to track your computers.

If you install software on your laptops and iOS devices that lets you remotely trigger a tracking mode, you can provide law enforcement with the location of your equipment.

Police may not have the personnel to go after every stolen $700 iPad, but reports of recoveries indicate officers find troves of stolen goods, and thus are more likely to follow up.

I recommend Orbicule's Undercover and GadgetTrak. Both companies' desktop products require the installation and registration of software on your Mac (GadgetTrak has a Windows version), after which you can mark a device as stolen through a website account associated with one or more of your computers

GadgetTrak also makes a $3.99 iOS app. (Undercover is $49 for a single license and $59 for up to five machines in a household. GadgetTrak for Mac is $19.95 per year for a single license, and $59.95 per year for five licenses.)

Apple offers Find My iPhone, which also works with the iPod touch and iPad, via MobileMe. This fall it will move the service, which it made free last year for anyone using iOS 4, to the iCloud service. Find My iPhone allows devices to be instantly located through a website or an iOS app.

Orbicule recently released Witness, which turns a camera built into or attached to a Mac into a motion detector. With Witness active, if motion is triggered before the alarm is disabled with a code, pictures and video are captured and uploaded to a central server.

Witness can be managed via a website or a free iOS app. (It's $39 for all computers, even hundreds, registered to the same account.)

GadgetTrak has another trick up its sleeve, for recovering the unrecoverable. The firm realized that many modern digital cameras embed the serial number of the camera directly into the metadata of an image file.

By scanning tens of millions of images on Flickr and other services, GadgetTrak created a free searchable database, Serial Search, that would let you see if your stolen camera's identifier had shown up elsewhere.

The advantage of many of these techniques, services, and systems is that once you have everything up and running, you can simply forget all about it until the worst happens.

Peace of mind requires some preparation.

Glenn Fleishman writes the Practical Mac column for Personal Technology and about technology in general for The Seattle Times and other publications. Send questions to gfleishman@seattletimes.com. More columns at seattletimes.com/columnists