Few people in the U.S. or even abroad live in a disaster-free zone. In the West, there are earthquakes and wildfires. In the Midwest, it’s tornados and flash floods as well as epic winter storms. In the East, it’s Nor’easters and hurricanes. There’s really a disaster waiting in the wings for nearly everyone, waiting to disrupt our lives, whether we’re at work or at home.
Sadly, much of our lives these days are stored on our computers. While a hurricane can leave you three to five days to plan and evacuate, an earthquake or tornado can strike without warning, leaving you little or no time to grab your computer or even run a back up on a CD. Thankfully, flash drives have come on the scene and now that their storage capacity had increased to over 128 gigs, they make an excellent backup drive that you can grab and go in seconds.
As anyone knows, hard drives can fail at a moment’s notice and many of us have prepared for that eventuality with an external hard drive. But in a disaster, these aren’t exactly portable. In some situations, you may be forced to flee on foot, leaving everything but the clothes on your back behind. In the old days, families and individuals planned for this eventuality by having a safety deposit box at the bank or a fireproof box in their home. With a flash drive, however, none of this is really needed. You can have all your important data backed up on a flash drive that is portable, universally compatible and robust.
Here, you can store everything you need, from important contacts, addresses and emails to scans of your driver’s license, school and work IDs, house deeds, rental agreements and insurance papers. You can also add all of the toll-free support numbers for your credit cards, banks and financial institutions along with photos of all your property and possessions along with complete written inventory of all your worldly goods. And while you’re at it, don’t forget scans of stocks and bonds, wills and other important documents.
Why use a flash drive instead of a safety deposit box? The reason is simple. In a major catastrophe you may not be able to get to the bank for days, perhaps even weeks. In the meantime, rescue workers and emergency personnel will have lots of questions as shelters open and state and federal agencies arrive on the scene to help people find loved ones, shelter, food and other important necessities that may be in short supply or difficult to access after a disaster strikes.
With the larger drives you should have plenty of extra space available. If this is the case, consider adding scans of all your precious (and irreplaceable) family photos on the drive. This will allow you to have a digital copy of your photos if the originals are lost.
If you’re cataloguing all your possessions you can lay each one out and capture it with a digital camera. There is software on the market to help you catalog it all and cross reference it for insurance purposes, if you’re putting in a claim for items, lost, damaged or destroyed in a disaster. Once everything is on the drive, it’s time to encrypt it. After all, there’s a lot of sensitive information on your drive. That said, there are fairly secure encryption products out there that will do the trick. They will prompt you to enter a password to either secure the drive or the files inside, if you’ve compressed them into a .zip file.
For maximum protection of important information, keep a drive with you at the office and have one at home or at a trusted friend’s house. Be sure to update it every six months or so, since information changes and you’re likely to buy new things for your home over time.
When disaster strikes, you’ll be ready. It only takes a moment to grab the flash drive and run, knowing that everything you need is right there with you, safe from loss and ready to access whenever and wherever you are.