We’ve been told for years that we’re entering the paperless world and that everything’s going digital. In some ways, that’s true. But we still have a lot of very important documents that cannot be lost and could be needed in difficult circumstances. Getting these documents organized, stored safely, and backed up is critical.
Physical Safe Keeping
To begin, you need to collect all of those important documents. Every family will have a different list, but here are some pretty common ones to get you thinking:
- Drivers licenses and passports
- Marriage license
- Social Security cards
- Birth certificates
- Other licenses (ham radio, concealed pistol, CPR certificates, etc.)
- Life insurance policies
- Deeds for your home
- Deeds for other property (cars, trailers, ATVs, etc.)
- Bills of sale from old assets
- Tax returns (seven years)
Once you’ve collected all of these documents, you need to get a lockbox in which to store them. If you don’t have a lot of documents, you can get something fireproof and waterproof like the SentrySafe CHW20221, or if you need more space, the SentrySafe SFW123GDC. Be sure to keep the key in a safe place as well.
Finally, be sure to keep the documents up to date. Some of them renew yearly, some less often, but when you receive updated documents, be sure to get them into the box and shred any old copies.
Digital Safe Keeping
After you’ve collected all of your documents you should scan them into PDF documents and store digital backups of them as well. You can get a fairly inexpensive and easy-to-use duplex color scanner like the Brother DS-620. Whatever you pick up, make sure it can scan duplex (both sides of a page at once) and easily combine the pages together into a single PDF document.
Be sure to organize the files and give them useful names so you can quickly find something later if you need. Then, pick up a few USB drives, ideally with metal enclosures so they can take a beating, like this Kingston Digital Traveler, a 32GB drive under $15.
If possible, you should use an encryption service like Windows BitLocker to encrypt the entire drive before you put any files on it. Finally, copy all of your PDF documents onto your USB drive. Keep one on your key chain, give one to your spouse, and give one to a close friend so you can always track a copy down if something like a house fire destroys everything.
Lastly, with all the space a 32GB drive offers, you can also store electronic copies of books on important topics like gardening or plant identification or even some good fiction. Having backups of all this stuff is good regardless, and having several encrypted copies is even better.
As with the hard copies, be diligent about keeping your digital backups up to date as you get newer documents.