There's two kinds of Bug Out's that need to be prepared for....

1) Non-Hostile:
allows one to bug out with a vehicle,
allows one to take the maximum amount of gear, food, and water,
allows one to take the mini/max amount of weapons,
allows one to settle @ a stable destination til time to return home.

2) Hostile:
one can take only what can be carried,
one can only take minimum gear, food, and water,
one can only take the minimum amount of weapons,
one can never stay in one place too long without others knowing that you're in the area.

You could also devide them between situations:

- Home-emergency bag:

Bag with stuff like digital stored photo's, important documents, spare cash, etc. For example when you have a house-fire. This is a short-term emergency.

- Disaster-emergency bag:

'Traditional' BOB for stuff that is used for example with large floods, hurricanes, earth-quakes, etc. when you don't know when/if you'll be coming back.

I'm not sure that just because a situation is non-hostile that it will allow you to bug out in a vehicle, ie, a traffic jam in an evacuation scenario.

Also, in a hostile situtation, I think I'd take the time (if possible) to load the most weapons I could carry.

Just my 2 cents.

I don't think I agree with there being two types. I like the categories in one sense, but I don't think one can say that a non-hostile situation might not become hostile. I think the more localized a situation, the less likely it beocmes hostile.

Also, I think the categories could get very gray, very quickly.

I like JIM's comments. As far as photogrpahs, I've been trying to get all of ours on dvd disks and want to give copies of the disks to relatives. When i finish, we should never need to worry about taking photos with us.

A USB flash drive or two would seem to be just the ticket, lighter and handier than a DVD collection. Put scans of all your important pictures and data on there.

NOTE TO SELF - DO THIS

I now have 16.5G of pictures on my laptop, USB flash drives that size are cost prohibitive. A couple dvd's burned every few months is a lot less expensive, plus I can mail copies to a couple people and have them already there rather than carrying.

That's my plan. I am copying the picture files onto DVDs, will keep copies and send duplicate copies of the DVDs to a relative or friend who lives elsewhere and is unlikely to experience the same events (say my in-laws in the Rockies). Hopefully, they will send me copies of their photos on DVDs. If either of our homes is ever destroyed, our precious memories will still be preserved.

I like flash drives, but once things are burned onto DVD, copying them is easy.

About a year ago when we made the trip to my parents for Christmas I put a CD binder with our DVD backups on the old gun rack in my old room and told her those were my backups.
of course she called my cell phone on the trip home and told me I forgot my CD's so I had to remind her they were backups I left there intentionally.

I picked up a 120GB USB back-up drive. Without looking at it, I'd guess it's 5"x3"x1/2", powered thru the USB port.

External hard drives have really dropped in price. I picked up my 250 gig model for $80. That's cheaper than some knives I've looked at. It backs up all my photos, papers, documents, programs, plus all my music. On the downside, it does need to be plugged into an outlet to work. I'm considering getting a smaller model (60 gigs), that just needs to hook into my laptop, to store my most important documents. Something more portable I can throw into a waterproof case and run.