Little treasures, our electronic devices. We tap away on them, carry them everywhere and curse when they’re not within arm’s reach. We also trust them with the keys to our digital lives, be they e-mail and social networking accounts, passwords to web services, photos or whatever.

What to do, then, if we lose them? One of the cleverest tools to emerge of late is “remote wiping” which, from a distance, allows you to tell a device to forget everything it knows. The Lojack service from Absolute works with all leading laptop brands, including Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Gateway and, for £40 a year, gives owners the security of knowing that they can delete anything on their machine if they lose it.

An additional “tracking” feature sends the laptop’s location to Absolute every 15 minutes if it has been reported stolen. Because this feature is hardware-based, there’s nothing that thieves can do to prevent the messages being sent, but they do have to be using the device to access the internet for it to be traced.

Company-issued BlackBerrys can also be wiped remotely, but for those who have bought their own, there’s an app called Ascendo DataVault — £23.45 in the BlackBerry App World — which allows owners to protect their passwords securely on the device with a special log-in. DataVault integrates neatly with the phone’s browser, so that when you click on your bank account details within the app, the browser fires up at the bank’s log-in page, with your details already filled out.

Last up, the iPhone, which this week introduces two new services: Remote Wipe, which works like Absolute’s service for laptops, but if you find the device again you can re-install your personal settings; and Find My iPhone, which lets owners track the location of a missing device on a map (again, only if the device is connected to the internet). To use either, though, you have to subscribe to Apple’s MobileMe service (£59 a year).

Additionally, both the iPod touch and iPhone have their own built-in security options, in the Settings menu. Here you can secure your device with a four-digit code. If ten unsuccessful attempts are made to crack the code, the device can be set to erase all data.

If you have a technology problem, e-mail

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