Your Life on a Stick Drive

Your Life on a Stick Drive

by Stephen Clay McGehee

It is amazing what can fit on today’s small USB drives, so if being prepared is important to you, it’s time to set up your own “Life on a Drive”. A standard piece of preparedness advice is to have a water-proof, fire-proof container with all of your important papers in it, and another with copies of those papers. A USB drive gives us more options, so let’s use them.

I began my own “Life on a Drive” project with a standard USB drive that can be purchased cheaply at any office supply store. A 2GB drive will work just fine, but as always, a larger drive gives you more space for more options. Start by going to www.portableapps.com to set up your USB drive with some basic (free) software such as a word processor, PDF viewer, email program, and whatever else looks interesting to you. Portable Apps allows you to simply plug your USB drive into any Windows computer and use your programs without leaving any trace on the host system. All your data and settings are saved to the USB drive – portable apps just uses the hardware and operating system of the host computer – nothing else.

This assumes, of course, that a computer and printer will be available at some point. While an extreme disaster may make your USB “Life on a Drive” useless, the incredibly small size and weight of a USB drive makes it well worth having even if there is only a low probability of having a computer available.

Once you have the portable apps system set up, start copying scanned images of your important papers and photos. Here are some ideas for what to include:

Scanned Images

• Passport
• Wallet contents (Driver’s License, credit cards, insurance cards, etc.)
• Recent utility bill to document your current place of residence
• Recent bank statement (to show account information)
• Investment statement (to show account information)

Text Files

• Contact information (name, email, phone, address)
• Central contact – who your family agrees to contact in case of separation.
• Family information – full name, date of birth, social security number, height, weight.

Photos

• Recent passport-type photos of your family members. Along with a good description, this can be used to quickly create a “Missing” poster to be distributed, or to distribute to various shelters

Family Information
The confusion that reigns following a large disaster means that family members could easily be separated. Having the information needed to reunite a family can be crucial. In 1998, I served as a radio operator in a Red Cross disaster shelter as wildfires burned large portions of our county. I had several requests from frantic people to try and help them locate other family members after they were separated. Having the right information can make it much easier to be reunited after a large-scale disaster. Planning to make sure that doesn’t happen in the first place is a much better way to go, of course.

Security
The information you will have on this drive must be protected! Make sure that all files that contain any sensitive information are encrypted.