The freelance setup is a single laptop that goes everywhere and holds everything: this client's contracts, that client's files, your invoicing, your email, all of it in one place and often signed in all at once. It is efficient, and it is a single point of failure. Lose the laptop, or let malware onto it, and you have not lost your data - you have lost several clients' data, and that is a different conversation.

The first risk is confidentiality. Clients trust you with things they would not want mixed together or exposed, and a device that is not encrypted turns a stolen laptop into an open filing cabinet. Full-disk encryption is built into modern Windows and Mac and takes minutes to switch on. With it, a lost laptop is a lost laptop. Without it, it may be a personal data breach you are obliged to report.

The second risk is invoice fraud, and freelancers are a favourite target because payment details travel by email and there is no finance department to double-check. If a client emails to say your bank details look wrong, or you get a message ‘from a client' changing where payment should go, treat it as suspect and confirm by phone. The same discipline protects you when it is your details someone is trying to spoof.

The third is simply working from anywhere. Cafe and hotel networks are fine for browsing and awful for assuming privacy. Keep the laptop patched, use a reputable password manager so every client login is unique, and lock the screen the moment you step away from it. None of this slows you down once it is set up, and all of it means that the day something goes missing, it is an annoyance and not a disclosure you have to make to everyone you work for.