Randomn3ss » Create a disaster ready backup of important information on a USB drive

This article was written by Mike Panic and is about: Awareness, Technology

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Last week a friend of mine experienced the joy of having a laptop hard drive crash. Not Windows crashing, the actual hardware had a mechanical failure. After spending about three hours, I got lucky and managed to recover most of his data and had the discussion with him on backing up important files. I then noticed his file cabinet and safe in his office and inquired about how much important information was in the file cabinet as opposed to the safe. Strangely, the safe had almost none of his important information inside of it, even though it was a higher end floor model with a 4-hour fire rating.

This led me to think about worst-case scenarios, as we just had a hard drive fail. What if the house caught fire, what if a burglar broke in, what if? Consider all of the tangible items you should have in a secure location.

Photo identification like drivers license, school and work ID, social security card, gym memberships
Credit cards and the toll-free customer support numbers
Banking account numbers and customer support numbers
Birth certificates
House deeds
Automobile titles
Stock and bond certificates
Insurance information
Wills

The list can go on and on, for most of these examples, we probably just have them in a drawer somewhere in our homes. Some people use safety deposit boxes for items like birth certificates or other items they don�t need access to often, but even those are somewhat vulnerable. When the World Trade Centers came down in 2001, the basement vaults contained thousands of safety deposit boxes. One of these boxes contained several thousand slides and negatives of the Kennedy family�s photographs over the years, including rare childhood photos of JFK and RFK. These are now gone, forever.

There is some preventive maintance you can do to help minimize the impact from a theft, natural disaster or just misplacing your items. Make digital copies of everything you have and store them on a USB flash drive. The cost of flash drives has dropped so low in recent months that it should be feasible for you to purchase more than one of them so you can keep them in separate locations for maximum redundancy. Keep one in an easily accessible part of your house, in case fire breaks out and you need to grab your family and just run, keep one with a trusted family member and perhaps another in a safety deposit box or at work.

Most everyone has a digital camera these days, however a scanner can be used as well. You need to photograph these under good lighting and with little or no distraction around them. Use white construction board available at any superstore and lay it flat on a dining room table and put a desk light by it. You do not want to use the flash for your digital camera, so take a few test shots and make sure nothing is blurry; a cheap tripod can help eliminate any blurred images. After you are happy with the test shots, view them on a computer at full resolution and make sure that everything on the document is legible. Now photograph everything at the highest setting your camera has, and photograph both sides of each item.

If you are using a scanner, see if the software you use has a document setting, most do. Once you have the item scanned, save it as a PDF file, a list of free and easy to use PDF software can be found here.

Use a simple text editor like notepad and type out all important contact numbers you have. This would include family and friends, insurance agents, lawyers, doctors, etc. My suggestion for using notepad instead of Word or other rich editor is because you never know what programs will be installed should you be in a situation where you don�t have access to your computer anymore. All computers can read simple text files.

With everything you have of importance in a digital format it is now time to make it move it to the USB flash drive and make it secure. My preference for this is to use WinZip to create a password protected .zip file. The reasoning for this is security. If the drive gets lots or stolen, you do not want all of your information readily available, it would make it too easy to have your identity stolen. To learn more about WinZip encryption, click here. Make sure the password you select is something you will remember, I�d also suggest sharing it with at least one trusted family member or friend. Learn how to create a secure password here.

Once everything is secure in an encrypted zip folder, move it to the USB flash drive. The nice thing about USB flash drives is that they work almost anywhere there is a computer. While media for computers is always changing, the USB function on a computer should be around for a good decade, maybe even longer. I would suggest that you check the contents of the drive every 6 months to ensure the drive still works and that everything on it is still readable. Put it on the list of things to do for daylight savings time, like checking smoke detector batteries.

Tip: Lifehacker has a great article on how to Make your lost USB drive call for help in the event you loose it!

Reference: Cheap USB flash drives