This is my version of the important documents (Blasts) binder or HYST if your familiar with the listening to katrina site. This stays in the top of my gun safe where it would survive a house fire or similar. If we had to Bug out Katrina style I can easily grab it and go. Its legal size because some of the deed paperwork to our farm land in WV (BOL) is legal size. I have in the right side all our joint documents such as out marriage license, house and land papers, etc. In the left are a pair of laptop drives inside USB enclosures that get a weekly copy to for backups and in the zipper pocket the USB cable. In the left are 4 report covers, one for each family member which contains individual papers such as birth certificate, ss# church membership, medical records, etc. This way if i need something for just one of us I can take it out and not the whole binder.



I pulled it out for my weekly backup and thought I'd finally post it.

I need to do this ....

My usb drive stays away from the house though in a locked drawer at work.

There is much wisdom in compiling one of these. Indispensable in a large-scale emergency.

But it's worth discussing risks as well. These are one-stop-shopping for the identity theft crowd.

So, best options for security? Physical? Encryption? Ensuring availability to the right people if you are out of action?

Just curious.

Physical security is covered by the safe, encryption via trucrypt. Then I can minimize risk by pulling out only one of the individual folders if its needed for one person.
If things got bad enough that I had to take this with me then first off identity theft is a lessor risk compared to the reason its being taken and second its going to be carried with us and not out of our sight.

googlemail has virtually unlimited storage, it,s free and the best email service i've tried.
qjs

<My usb drive stays away from the house though in a locked drawer at work.

But services like googlemail/docs are online. If I ever needed to access those documents even a couple G at my BOL would take days to download due to dial up or cell phone data only, too far out for any high speed connection.

I have hundreds of gigs of photos, irreplaceable photos. Gmail and the like aren't suitable for storing that.

my gmail account gives me 7,555 megabytes of storage. So not 'hundreds of gigs' but enough for a lot. And of course you can open as many accounts as you like.
qjs

<I have hundreds of gigs of photos, irreplaceable photos. Gmail and the like aren't suitable for storing that.

I use Carbonite, an online backup service with unlimited storage and remote access to your backed-up files. It's awesome. I have no affiliation other than as a happy customer.

I at 60G of just pictures, my 160G backup drive is getting pretty full so I have to exclude a couple things that are not irreplaceable.
But again, the big issue is restoring, you don't know what download speed you may get where you end up, or in my case I know is dial up and 36k max because the phone lines are so long/old/bad you can't even get a 56k connection there so I'd never be able to perform a restore.

If your going to rely on someone else for data backups then why not rely on someone else such as FEMA for food/water, why prepare?