http://www.knowyourstuff.org

It's a pretty darn good program for inventorying your possessions and creating an organized record, including photos. Check it out. I'm going to create the inventory and keep both a hardcopy and a software copy offsite from my home. You could also create the home inventory and email it to offsite locations for remote retrieval.

Have you tired to open its data files in another progrm to see if the data is readable. That would be a caution if you e-mailed the file somewhere and then found you couldn't open it on another PC. One suggestion I would make it to save the program installer as well as the data files on a cd, I used to do this a lot when I would download a program because it always seems to happen that the program isn't available a few years later when I want it.

How can you be sure that this is safe? If the program lets you do the inventory, then "phones home" (email, fax,binary file transfer), the criminals would have a good idea of whose homes to burglarize. If you have enough good stuff, they might be willing to travel!

Just as a point of interest: A friend of mine used to be an insurance adjuster for Farmers Insurance. She said the company told people who had major losses that they should have had an inventory stashed in a safe place. If someone DID have an inventory and then had a major loss, the company viewed them with suspicion for having the information. Pretty two-faced, eh?

Sue

When my house burned to the ground in 94, one of the few things that survived were a box full of photos we'd taken of the house interior and exterior. The house was built in 1920 and we were rennovating it, and wanted a bunch of before and after shots. Having photos to look at while you're filling out your claim sure was handy at identifying everything that was unidentifiable after the fire. The insurance never questioned why we had such a good photo record, but I wasn't too worried about what they might think.

If you are worried that the insurance adjuster would be suspicous, then my recommendation is to tape video of some mundane but pertinent events in your home every so often, thus cataloging indirectly all contents. Things like birthdays, Christmas, there are plenty of opportunities for this. No video, then photos are just about as good.

It is a little difficult to visualize what was where after a big fire. A visual reference certainly helps a lot.

Of course, you would keep the video and/or photos somewhere protected. We were lucky.

The application is being put out by the insurance information institute so its probably safe, that is if you trust insurance people of any kind.