Safe-guarding your documents and photos

So you're house just burned down, or was leveled by a tornado, or inundated by a flood. Where are the important documents you may need? Your insurance agreements, your identification (social security cards, birth certificates, passports, titles to cars, etc.)? Your photo albums? If they only exist in paper form in your house, you may be out of luck. Ask anyone who has lost everything to a fire or other disaster and they'll say they miss their pictures most because they aren't replaceable.

There are a few simple ways you can protect all your important documents and have them available to you almost anywhere you go.

1. Make copies to keep in your house and store the originals in a safe deposit box. Documents are only available to you if you can reach the bank, but the originals are preserved.  Some may consider fireproof safes kept in the home, but these are also not 100% guaranteed.
   
2. Scan copies into digital format (PDF is preferred) and email them to yourself. Documents can be accessed anywhere an internet connection is available, but you won't have your original documents.
3. Build a bomb-proof, steel reinforced, concrete fortress in your backyard and encase your documents in a lead shielded, booby trapped Zero-Halliburton briefcase inside. Great conversation piece for parties, but may not match with your new patio furniture.

As for your photos, getting and using a scanner is a must. You can easily scan all your old photos and upload them to any number of photo sites such as Flickr or Google Photos and they will be saved online permanently. (Some of these sites may limit the amount of data you can upload per month unless you pay for their premium services).  Any new digital photos you take can be easily and automatically backed up for you using free software such as Picasa or iPhoto.

You may have a slew of computer files as well that you wouldn't like to lose in a disaster. These also can be easily backed up for safe keeping and can be available almost anywhere. Several free online back-up services are available, including Dropbox and Syncplicity. They both allow you to back-up most of your documents and computer files online and have them accessible from any computer hooked up to the internet (check their websites for more details as some do not allow back-up of all types of files and have storage limits). Online email services, particularly Gmail, allow you to email documents to yourself then file them away in various folders that can be accessed anytime. 

So if you've been holding on to 19 years of tax returns and MasterCard statements or just saving those paper instructions on how to build a canoe out of phonebooks and electrical tape, you better get to backing them up friend, or you'll be out of luck when the big one hits and your house is washed away in an alluvium of coal ash and mercury laden sewer effluent (worst case scenario, probably won't happen to everybody).

Feel free to respond to this post if you have any questions or suggestions.