You moved to Lagos for the sunshine, the Atlantic, the pace of life. What you probably did not plan for was the digital vulnerability that comes with living abroad — using café WiFi, connecting to marina networks, banking across borders, managing your entire life through a laptop that, if lost or stolen, could expose everything you own.
I have been inside the Apple ecosystem since 1996 — first at Apple's own UK support team, then building Mac support companies across Sweden and London, and now here in Lagos, helping the expat community keep their digital lives intact. This is what I tell every client who asks how to stay safe online.
The Story of Mercedes
A true story — name used with permission
Mercedes is a French expat who has lived in Lagos for three years. Sharp, organised, runs her consultancy remotely from a MacBook Pro. One afternoon she left her bag — MacBook inside — at a café near the marina. By the time she realised, it was gone.
She called me in a panic. Within the hour we had remotely locked and erased the device via Find My Mac. Her entire drive had been encrypted with FileVault from day one, so whoever took it had an expensive paperweight. Her emails were hosted on private-hosting.com — not Gmail, not iCloud — so there was no route in through a compromised Google account. Her Time Machine backup was current to the previous evening.
By that same afternoon, Mercedes was working again on a borrowed Mac, with every file, every email, every application restored exactly as she had left them. She lost a MacBook. She lost nothing else.
That is what proper security looks like.
Step One: Encrypt Your Mac
FileVault is Apple's built-in full-disk encryption. It is free, it is already on your Mac, and it takes three clicks to turn on. With FileVault active, your data is completely unreadable without your password — even if someone removes the drive and connects it to another machine.
Go to System Settings → Privacy & Security → FileVault → Turn On. That is it. Your Mac encrypts in the background while you work.
- All data on the drive is encrypted with AES-128
- Unreadable without your login password
- No performance impact on modern Macs
- Works alongside Find My Mac for remote erase
Step Two: A VPN You Can Trust
Every time you connect to a café, hotel or marina WiFi network in Lagos — or anywhere — your traffic is potentially visible to whoever runs that network. A VPN encrypts everything between your Mac and the internet, making it unreadable to anyone in the middle.
I use and recommend Proton VPN. It is Swiss-based, which means it operates under some of the strongest privacy laws in the world. It is open source — anyone can inspect the code. It has a genuinely useful free tier, and the paid plan is reasonable. Unlike many VPNs that sell your data to advertisers, Proton's business model is privacy itself.
- Encrypts all traffic on public WiFi
- Swiss jurisdiction — no data retention laws
- Open source and independently audited
- Works on Mac, iPhone and iPad simultaneously
- Free tier available — no excuse not to use it
Turn it on every time you leave the house. Make it a habit as automatic as putting on your sunglasses.
Step Three: Private, Encrypted Email
Gmail reads your email. Not a conspiracy theory — it is in their terms of service. The content of your messages is used to build an advertising profile. For most people that is an uncomfortable fact they accept. For anyone running a business, handling client data, or simply valuing their privacy, it is unacceptable.
Through private-hosting.com — my sister company, founded in 2012 — I offer email hosting that is genuinely private. Your email lives on our servers, not Google's or Microsoft's. No advertising. No data mining. No third parties. Your domain, your data, fully under your control.
- Your own domain — not @gmail or @hotmail
- No advertising, no data mining, ever
- Encrypted in transit and at rest
- Looks more professional to clients
- Setup and migration included
Step Four: Backup. Properly.
The expat's nightmare is not losing a Mac. It is losing everything on it. Photos from the last three years. Client contracts. Tax documents. The novel you have been writing on Sunday mornings. All of it, gone.
Time Machine is Apple's built-in backup system. Connect an external drive, switch it on, and your Mac backs up automatically every hour. If the worst happens — theft, a spilled glass of wine, a hard drive failure — you restore from the backup and carry on.
For belt-and-braces protection, combine Time Machine with a cloud backup. That way a physical disaster at home — a flood, a break-in that takes both Mac and external drive — does not take your data with it.
- Time Machine backs up hourly, automatically
- Restores individual files or the entire Mac
- Works with any external USB or Thunderbolt drive
- Combine with cloud backup for complete protection
Step Five: Find My Mac
Enable Find My Mac in System Settings → Apple ID → iCloud → Find My Mac. If your Mac is stolen, you can locate it on a map, lock it remotely with a custom message, or erase it completely — all from your iPhone or any browser.
With FileVault enabled and Find My active, a stolen Mac is nothing more than an insurance claim. Your data is safe regardless.
The Complete Setup — Five Steps, One Afternoon
- FileVault encryption — turn on in System Settings
- Proton VPN — install, set to auto-connect on public WiFi
- Private email hosting via private-hosting.com
- Time Machine backup — plug in a drive, switch on
- Find My Mac — enable in iCloud settings
None of this is complicated. None of it is expensive. All of it, together, means that whatever happens to your device — theft, loss, failure — your data and your privacy remain intact. Mercedes can tell you exactly how much that is worth.
Need help setting this up?
I do this for clients in Lagos all the time. One session — remote or in person — and your Mac is properly secured, backed up and private. Same day.
Get in touch →Miguel de Sousa Pires is an Apple specialist since 1996, founder of mafiaBusiness London, and now based in Lagos, Portugal. MacLagos.com provides Apple Mac support for the expat community in Lagos in English, Portuguese, Swedish and French.