IMO, good advice for any encounter with LEOs. Do what you are told. If you think that your rights have been violated, sue (later). A confrontation or worse with an LEO on the street will inevitably end up with you losing. We have a number of LEOs on the forum, and I'm sure they can tell many stories about how when they are looking for/chasing an armed felon and run into someone who fits the description (but later turns out is not the bad guy)and who decides that his rights are being violated and argue/resist the officers. Not a good situation.

I can cite four examples of where this is not the case for me:

a) iTunes purchased music & video. Once you download these, you (generally) can't do it again. For a few years, we bought a lot of media from Apple via their iTunes store, with music and video it's about 60GB of data I can't replace with a re-download.

b) Family Videos. I have about 200GB of family videos, dating back to the 1980's as transferred from old VHS tape, Mini-DV and more recently SD cards in various digital cameras. I can't get those back, especially the old VHS tapes which have degraded to the point where they don't play.

c) Scans of bank statements, health expenses, utility bills and the like going back to 2000. That's about 10 GB right there - I scan to 300 DPI TIFF, usually, for best print reproduction and ease of conversion to other formats.

d) Family Photos. We shoot at 3 megapixels, normally, and occasionally at 6 Megapixels. Our photo library, which includes originals and modified versions of images, is currently 64GB.

All told, my media library, plus misc documents, work related stuff, and so on, weighs in at around 500 Gigabytes. Fortunately, USB disks are relatively low cost so that's not an issue. Every computer gets it's own USB drive of about the same capacity of the internal drive.

I'm a big fan of automated external disk storage, as we tend to use laptops a lot. On the Mac side, we use SuperDuper, which makes a bootable image of the entire disk, this is by far the way we like to make things work. We do have a couple of PC's, these back up only the "My Documents" directory to external USB Drives, as these are single-user machines, that's all I care about.
Two systems run Ubuntu 8.04, and for that, I have sbackup running, which is more than good enough.

EVERYTHING also backs up to a 500GB disk (it's actually 2x 500GB disks, set up as RAID1) set up as Network Attached Storage, that disk array is actually located in a small refrigerator out in the shed, along with a set of DVD's with a backup of applications. That's the "house burns down" storage center. Very old media, stuff that isn't likely to change, is also burned off to DVD where possible, many of the files are too large for optical media (especially home videos), so they live on Magnetic Media.

It's a lot of work running a data center at home.

Martin, that sounds like way too much work for me. However, much of it also sounds like it's not a bad idea, and I should back up a lot more things than I do. Most of our data is simply kept in its original form. So, you might be inspiring me to do something with it. I'm not there yet, but maybe it will happen. You're certainly mroe on top of this stuff than I am.

My question is what happens when something serious happens on your property. I know Bucks County is not exactly in tornado alley, but if all your data, video and photos are all within a short distance of each other, isn't there some vulnerability. Isn't there something that could happen and destroy it all within a short time?

I want my photographs a few states away, and in the hands of a few different trusted friends or family. I don't think anything will happen in Colorado, Minnesota and New York within a short time. If one set of DVDs might be destroyed, I can always burn another. I should follow your example and add more things to what I back up and get to other locations.

For me, it's about Fire & Wind. The main thing is that the External USB drives connect for backup, and then go into the fire safe - a MEDIA RATED fire safe. It's just a habit.

The storage drive in the shed is, admittedly, close to the house, but I've been to enough fires to see that the outbuildings tend to survive, so that's the logic of why the extra backup.

And then, there's Google and my own servers that I run for focazio.com.

And there's a stash of DVD's of the photos and some videos, which are at an undisclosed location off-site, in a physically secure location.

The stories told to CNN and Shephard at Fox news were later determined to be mostly fabrications and rumors. However, the heavy-handed (and illegal, watch the lawsuits roll!) confiscation of all firearms was a sad, knee-jerk reaction to a perceived, but rather exaggerated threat.

OP really hit home for me. I was not able to make it back home one night after work d/t a pup trailer full of propane exploding. They evacuated over 1000 homeowners. Our home escaped evacuation but I did not escape the perimeter. That is when the importance of having a 72 hour car kit hit me. I mentally went over everything I had. Money was actually the most important after comms. It felt good to know that a forced night away from home would be, at worst, an inconvenience.

Looking back, though, penetrating the perimeter would have been pretty easy. Just park about 1/4 mile from the perimeter and walk through. They just don't have the manpower to stop foot-traffic through the non-road areas...as long as it's night.

But I let discretion be the better part of valor.