Organizing the Important Documents Binder

I'm starting my winter prep organization early this year (or is it late last year since I never got much done last year).
Usually in winter I do all my paperwork, make sure all the important docs are up so date, etc.
I'm noticing I'm not that consistent in order and organization so I'm pulling everything out and sorting, organizing and prioritizing it.
I've come up with the following categories:

1. Identity - Birth certificate, social security card, diplomas, church/organization memberships, etc.

2. Health - doctor visits, prescriptions, all medical related records

3. Finances - Statements for savings, cd's, investments, retirement, etc.

4. Education - school transcripts, grades, etc

5. possessions - receipts for things.

I've also prioritized in that order so as I start at the front of the binder the most important I get to first and insure is up to date.
Seem like I'm missing anything or out of order?

Got kids? Immunizations, school records, etc.

Got pets? Immunizations, license numbers, microchip numbers, tattoos, registration papers.

Sue

Business cards from all your doctors, attorneys, tax accountant, contact for your bank branch or person who talked you there about a loan, guy who sold you your car insurance, health insurance rep or brokers, companies HR person.

Copy of home warranty, life insurance policy's, location or point of contact for deeds and wills.

A file for home issues, like business cards or company receipt for the guy that cuts your trees once a year, the plumber who cut you a deal, basically any person that has done work at your house or on your house that you want to continue using.

Add passport to your #1.

I would take a video of the inside of your house. Walk around and show every room and layout. Zoom in on important insurance items like paintings, comic book collections, furs and jewels. Show any documents that would verify it. (Lay things out on a bed or counter for a full viewing of multiple items.

not in any particular order...some other suggestions

DD214 and shot records
Will and last requests
Surrogate of Health Care authorization
DNR directions and authorization
Power of Attorney
deed of property
deed of sepulcher
property insurance
personal insurance
vehicle insurance
vehicle titles

photocopy of insurance cards and licenses on waterproof paper
photocopy of important business cards on waterproof paper
photocopy of important phone numbers on waterproof paper

Immunizations are in #2. health section, school records in the #4. education.

Hmm, I've never hired anyone to do home maintenance, do it all myself so no cards there
don't have a passport

I need to check with my current insirance company on validiaty of a video record, they are decent so I bet that will work. I've tried to make a claim with other larger companies before and pictures/videos don't count for anything, their response was how do we know the items in the pictures are yours and not someone elses, you need reciepts. Which is why I now save as many receipts as possible.

I guess I wasn't real clear in the initial post, I was asking more along the lines of do the catrgories and prioritization of them look right, I have pretty much everything in there, its just not organized well.

Mine is set up by family member having their own color coded folder w/ name on it, & biz card inserts and sheet protectors to hold it all together. Each person has their own folder with their own set of biz cards, id's, records, etc. Plus one just for Household stuff. All the folders are put in a bright single legal sized expandable wallet. I also have CD's and jump drives have scanned files and personal photos in the wallet.

? - do you keep co ies of your important documents off-site? My bank told me today that I qualify for a free safe deposit box box at any branch. If I had to pay would it be worth it? Should I keep originals at home or in the SDB?

We used to have a SDB, but it was costing us ~$50 a year so we cancelled it. i have originals at home or the point of contact to get an original in my files, (i.e. email or phone number for our schools, state agencies, hospitals, etc).

I recently started a online SDB. I've color scanned almost all our important docs. I created a obscure email account with an online company and attached the scans to emails that I leave in the Draft folder. That way if I ever lost my driver licence, passport, or say whole wallet, using my iPhone or computer or I could access the account from anywhere in the world to get a copy out of the Draft folder. I've been told a clean copy will suffice an initial interaction with police or govt agencies if exigent situation exists.

its basically a poor mans Carbonite dot com.

I have all my originals in my gun/fire safe at home.
I saw the stories of people going back to NOLA to find their bank branch under water so the contents of their SDB were ruined. If we were ever in a similar situation where we had a couple days notice to leave like they did I want mine accessible to take with me.

If someone came to me with a "scanned" document, in this age of Photoshop and other programs like that - I would have to wonder.

Show me several documents with the same name and date, no problems there, no crook is going to go to a lot of work to scam someone, that's why they are crooks. But one, or two? I dunno.

This from the guy who is scanning documents tomorrow to start his binder. I will have hardcopies in the binder, originals are going to a SDB I get free, and 2d copies to a thumbdrive. I reckon if all the documents match so much the better.

Also, I have a list with important phone numbers and account/policy numbers that can be printed out after being reduced, rendering it wallet size. May take a magnifying glass to read, but better than nothing.

Pictures or yourself, all of you family, all of your pets, etc. (individual pictures). So if you get separated during a disaster, you can post "Have you seen XXX?" pictures.

I suppose I should print a recent picture out, all our pictures are digital (thousands of them)

And dont forget recent photos of your pets, along with spare ID tags, collar, leash and vaccination documents. Not all in the binder of course.

Oops, haertig already said it.

If you're going to store info on the Internet, spend a little money and use a system that utilizes encryption technology. Your info can't be that important if you're not willing to spend $5 - $10 per month for a service that encrypts. By the way, a complicated password is not the same as encryption.

I would encrypt all data myself, using a proven (and free) product like TrueCrypt, and not use built in encryption from some service. You don't know how good that services encryption is, or if they hold back door keys.

I don't think that's necessary. Also, you could say the same thing about TrueCrypt because you didn't personally write their algorithm, did you? Also, using TrueCrypt would hinder the convenient process of syncing that an online services uses.

If the online service uses 128-bit or 256-bit encryption BEFORE your data is sent to them over the Internet, then your data can't be decrypted by using another backdoor key besides the encryption key you created. If the service does not have the key, then the data cannot be decrypted and is garbage to anybody without the key. Of course, a hacker could guess your key via brute force, but you can make guessing basically impossible if you have a complicated key that's in your brain (or otherwise not on a computer anywhere).

And there's the catch. You may indeed be using your KEY, but you are using THEIR ALGORITHM. Good encryption requires both a strong key and a rock solid algorithm. And the algorithm should be open source so anybody and everybody can review it. A strong algorithm does NOT depend on secrecy for being strong. For all you know, the service providers algorithm may be nothing more than "take the first character of the users key and prepend that to their data stream". Of course that's a silly contrived example, but it illustrates my point.

Also, if they use a proprietary algorithm, and then they go out of business, how are you going to unencrypt your own data (unless you stored a second copy elsewhere for your self)?

As an emxalpe, tihs setnecne is eyncrtepd.

But I'll bet you can read every word of it. It's a bad algorithm.

AFAIK, and I could be wrong, these online storage/encryption places use their own algorithms. Even if they say they use publically available and secure algorithms, you don't know if they're telling the truth unless you download that algorithm independantly (from some other source), review it yourself, compile it yourself, and apply it yourself. Very few people will have the expertise or will power to review source code and compile themselves, but using a well known, vetted and proven product (I mention TrueCrypt again) takes you one step away from the total unknown of an online companies proprietary or undisclosed encryption algorithm.

If you can provide a case where somebody's data was hacked on a major service without it being user error, then please share. Otherwise, I'm not going to stress. If a service says their using 256-bit encryption, it's a matter of reading up and developing trust with a company I guess. You could also be paranoid to the point of not wanting to put your money in a bank.

On my service, I lost my encryption key one time. I talked to a tech supervisor and was willing to pay good money for them to recover my data. Nope, it was impossible. They don't store the keys, and the data is useless to them without the encryption key.

Regarding the part about a company going out of business, note that you have this risk even if you're using TrueCript, unless you're running your own external database over the Internet. Anyway, how likely is it that they'll go out of business right before a disaster? One way to hedge against that unlikely risk is to use two services.

Also, if you can figure out how to use TrueCrypt with my service's syncing function, then let me know. I backup all my files at least once per day. If I can't sync with TrueCrypt, then it's not practical for me to use it.

T r u e C r y p t
Free open-source disk encryption software

There is no company to go out of business. With open source if the project would be abandoned by its original authors someone else can pick it up or someone else can make a way to get your data back out of it.
I run all open source after being burned before. Imagine you made a simple database for your home insurance inventory in Microsoft access 1.0 and then 10 years later you need to file a claim and you find out that you can't get Access 1.0 to work on your current OS and import support for 1.0 was dropped a couple versions ago. You then have to search out and OS old enough to run the old version then search for the old version. I've been there and done that both for myself and clients who put important data into a closed source app and find out they can't read that data later.
I 1. stick wit open source and 2. do test restores of old data. to be sure I can still get it if needed.
I've been burned by MS access, MS Visio ,MS money and even had a couple old pfd's that wouldn't read in modern versions.

I already got the point about TrueCrypt being open source and not going out of business, and it's well taken. However, if you aren't going to slow down and figure out what I'm asking, then how can I trust that you fully understand what you're preaching?

My point above about TrueCrypt is that you still have to store your data on an external database system. (We are talking about external backup over the Internet, not local backup.) That external database system can go out of business, just like Carbonite (or similar) can go out of business. However, if you're running Carbonite (or similar) you have a monthly bill. So, you're forced to keep track if and when Carbonite went out of business, and you can adapt in a timely manner.

In contrast, with the database where you store your TrueCrypt files, it's quite likely a person won't check the database but twice a year. So, although your TrueCrypt would be fully capable of decrypting your files, there may not be any files to decrypt. Unlikely? Well, we are talking about unlikely scenarios after all.

QUESTIONS:

Can you sync with TrudCrypt? I need to sync about 80 GB of data. In other words, I need it to update only the changed files. I like the idea of TrueCrypt, but if I can't sync, then I can't use.

What is a reliable external database for storing your TrueCrypt files? I need to store externally over the Internet. I'm NOT talking about local storage, and I'm NOT talking about saving to an external hard drive and physically taking it to an external location.

Convenience is the enemy of security. Security is the enemy of convenience. You have to find where in the spectrum you sit to balance things out.

Personally, I work in computer security, networking, proramming, etc. so quite predictably I sit on the high security/low convenience end. What might be considered inconvenient to some, is normal everyday to me. But that is not to say that the way I do things is the right way for everyone. Online encrypted storage through a third party provider is miles ahead of no backups at all.

With online storage, you are at the mercy of having a working internet connection to access your data. Access is not a given in a disaster situation. But if your data is not time-critical for you to access, online storage may be just fine for you. And if the data you store is not really all that important, storing/encrypting to keep 99% of the hackers out may be a perfectly fine tradeoff too. "Tradeoff" meaning, dropping down to 99% security adds much convenience for you, in that you WILL backup your data at this level of convenience, but you probably would NOT go to the inconvenience of handling things at the 99.99% security level.

For most people, 99% security/accessibility (I just made that number up as an example) is perfectly adequate. The biggest issue I see for most people, is the questionable internet access that may keep them from accessing their data during a disaster. The chance of a company going out of business and you losing access to your online stored data forever is probably an acceptable risk for the vast majority of folks. That risk is certainly better than not backing up your data at all.

Before this gets out of hand like another similar thread, can we all understand that backup over the Internet is ONE backup layer of many? I understand it's not perfect, but it's ONE layer and has advantages that some of the other layers don't have. I'd rather not argue about why Internet backup sucks because, again, it's ONE layer.

Now, assuming that I'm talking about external backup over the Internet, is TrueCrypt a good way to go? To keep it simple and focused, I'd prefer if someone can answer the questions from my previous post...

QUESTIONS:

Can you sync with TrudCrypt? I need to sync about 80 GB of data. In other words, I need it to update only the changed files. I like the idea of TrueCrypt, but if I can't sync, then I can't use.

What is a reliable external database for storing your TrueCrypt files? I need to store externally over the Internet. I'm NOT talking about local storage, and I'm NOT talking about saving to an external hard drive and physically taking it to an external location.

No, I don't think TrueCrypt or any other local-based encryption/storage method would be the way to go for you. You have stated your requirement for the convenience that is provided by online storage like Carbonite, and I think that is the best solution for you. Other solutions might provide better security and better accessability, but they will require more computer knowledge and will be more inconvenience to use.

I read "Regarding the part about a company going out of business, note that you have this risk even if you're using TrueCript"

I thought you meant the company truecrypt going out of business, has nothing do so with slowing down, it wasn't clear that you meant the online backup company going out of business or the encryption company going out of business.
I've lost data to both, if you want an online example, hotmail lost all my data years ago when I was using them (the e-mail documents to yourself to store in e-mail).

IDrive is one service that meets the following requirements:

1. Backup onto an external database over the Internet.
2. Reasonable assurance the database is maintained to withstand foreseeable disasters.
3. Syncing capability for 150 GB or more that allows efficient backup at least once per day.
4. Reasonable assurance of data security (i.e., solid encryption method).

We're always talking about surviving massive disasters in the future, but what about surviving my everyday life right now? IDrive saves locally deleted files until I wipe them out on IDrive. This nice little feature has saved my ass on several occasions in everyday life, and is something I have not found in another service within this price range.

Again, regarding the issue of going out of business or out of date, I pay a monthly fee. I'll know IDrive hasn't gone out of business, or out of date, in the last 30 days at worst. Actually, I backup at least once per day, and so I would know if IDrive went out of business within the last 24 hours. Anyway, I have not read of any such problems with any online backup service.

Although I do admit TrueCrypt has its place, it still doesn't offer what I need based on my requirements here. I go through this exercise about once per year.

Haha, I was thinking the same thing reading this thread: "this whole track sounds very familiar...". I think it was the same players too, thus I had to chime in to keep the vibe up.

I use SyncBack and TrueCrypt to manage multiple backups on multiple (but local) sites. I am investigating the online backup services to add another layer.

I hope this thread continues but with less vitriol than last time. We have a lot of valuable expertise on the forum.

You can use TrueCrypt to encrypt folders or drives. You can mount the drives/folders(decrypted) and they work just like any other mounted disk. So yes, you can sync. Download it and give it a whirl. I'm not particularly computer savvy and found it pretty straight forward.

You could then upload to a draft email, Google account, etc. free of charge (within their storage parameters). Personally, I just make an encrypted back-up that stays at home and one of essential data on a thumb drive that goes with me. I don't need any more of my personal info floating about the net than already exists (encrypted or not).