Disaster Tip of the Week: Keep Digital Backups of Important Documents on A USB in Your Disaster Kit

Last week I gave you the tip about keeping important documents in ziplock bags. This week I am recommending that you keep digital copies of these documents on a USB key in your disaster kit.

If you have to evacuate quickly due to a disaster or other event you may have a limited amount of time to gather important documents before you have to leave. In addition to limited time, it is also easy to forget something while you are preparing to leave.

While you are fleeing there is a good chance that items may become lost, damaged etc. Having the items stored digitally gives you an advantage of having the information at your finger tips to read off to someone, and in some cases you may have an easier time replacing the documents.

If possible store a digital copy of the document in pdf format and use notepad to enter important information about the documents such as ID numbers, and other important information for each document.

The reason for this is you may not have access to a computer that can easily open the digital document, but you should at least be able to find a computer that will allow you to read the text based documents.

The main idea here is to speed up your ability to replace the documents should you need to do so, and proving it is you will speed the process up a bit.

If you can also include recent and updated photos of each family member in case you become separated.