Data Safety - Time Machine Backup HD

Greetings,
Our organization uses time machine and individual external HDs to backup our workstations. Most of the employees use laptops, and leave the external HDs at their desk.
Does anyone have any suggestions for keeping this data safe? Is the best solution to lock the HDs? If the HDs are indeed stolen would it be easy for someone to access the data that has been backed up?
Thanks in advance for your ideas and insight.

If the drives were stolen, then yes, the data would be moderately easy to access. Of course, the same is true of the data on the laptops, which are far more likely to be stolen given their portable nature and the fact that they're taken out of the office regularly. Don't be fooled by the login system... a knowledgeable person could have full access to any of the data on your laptop's hard drive within minutes.
The only way to protect your data is through encryption. I don't generally recommend File Vault, which encrypts the entire user folder. This is almost always extreme overkill and causes all kinds of problems (including problems backing up and restoring). You can create an encrypted disk image, using Disk Utility, to store sensitive data, and this disk image will also be encrypted in the backup. You could also try using some other backup software that supports encryption of the backups, but that still leaves the originals on the laptops in a vulnerable state.

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