How I got mugged and what I learnt from it

The part I don't understand is why you would lose access to his Gmail/Dropbox accounts after getting your laptop stolen. Did you rely on automatic logins for all your accounts or something?

Also, why would you backup anything on the same hard drive. That's not a backup, its wasting space.

In this day and age, who doesn't sync their contacts to the cloud. All of the most popular services (Google for sure) do it automatically unless you turn it off (in which case, you should have known what you were doing).