Slashdot Mirror
Condensing Your Life on to a USB Flash Drive?
Fear the Clam asks: "My wife and I figure that if we plan for the worst, it'll never happen, so we've been putting together 'If public transportation bites it and we have two minutes to grab our stuff and start walking, never to return to NYC' getaway knapsacks. With luck they'll live in the closet forever.
Coincidently, this morning the New York Times has an article about what to take when you have to leave home in a big hurry [DNA verification required], and they suggest making a list of all of things like Social Security and credit card numbers, scanning birth certificates, marriage license and tax returns, and saving it all on a USB flash drive. Since this would be a complete identity kit, encryption is of utmost importance. What's the best solution? A flash drive that claims to encrypt or a platform-independent, self-extracting, encrypted file on a regular drive? Any suggestions for sturdy drives?" Of course, the choice of USB flash drive covers only a part of the problem. What other data would you put on this piece of "contingency hardware", and how would you protect the drive itself in case you did have to "swim for it"?
I've had three USB Flash Drives (Lexar, and two Sandisks) die on me, usually under a year, presumably a byproduct of the limited writes available to NAND memory.
My philosophy is that if DC is in such shape that I can never return, I really don't care about carrying around any personl data or very much anything else other than my life. We were having a discussion at work about whether our web backups could survive a nuclear attack... but if there's a nuclear attack, our website is the least of my concerns.
Paper.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Most USB drives are pretty tough. I would make a copy or two and put it in a crush/water proof case like an Otterbox.
screw Social Security, they're going bankrupt anyway... on my emergency flash drive it's all about the pr0n.
I always swallow my USB identity drives
Flash Drive for a Flash flood? Lovely!
Wrap it in plastic
As far as encryption goes, for god's sake don't rely on anything the manufacturers ship. That stuff is meant to protect you from your average luser seeing files, not anybody who is honestly interested. Use Blowfish or Twofish for proper 2 way encryption.
Make sure the drive is waterproof
Tatoo yourself in reeealy reealy little 1's and 0's. Tatoo your wife with the decryption key.
I have that stuff hanging off some files on my vanity domain web site. When I catch my breath, I can find a cybercafe and grab what I may need. There's always that garbage-mail project by that "only doing a little evil" big corporation on some property tax free land in Cali if you don't trust your own hosting company.
Wouldn't accepting scanned documents of identification open many a door for counterfeiters and scam artists, and even, dare I say, potential terrorists? *Raises terror alert to mauve*
You can store 5 minutes DV-quality porn on a 1GB stick.
If you are a man of questionable tolerance and determination, I suggest you use some kind of compression.
Oh - you mean like a "real real" drought or some other real natural disaster? Oh sorry.
(Goes back to work)
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
Well if your going to be all paranoid, you might as well get one of these.
Reality test... am I dreaming?
...bypasses your 128-bit encryption by putting a knife to your sweetheart's throat and demands the passphrase, or else.
You give it.
End of story.
--
You didn't know.
....is your friend. Don't trust the key vendor's utility. PGP can be accessed from any platform and isn't Win32-specific as the vendor's software is.
What would I put onto a USB flash drive in case of an emergency?
...
GLQuake ^_^
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
Upload it to the internet and let the world mirror it.
Sounds like a really good business to start up. An online place where you can store personal information on protected servers. Have everything encrpyted when its uploaded and stored on servers. Then to retrieve the information you have to call or something. er well it sounded like a good idea at first =)
Would it not be better to simply keep a set of laminated copies of all those documents? In the case that you don't have access to a computer when you need it? There isn't always going to be a Kinko's or internet cafe nearby when you're in the midst of a terrorist attack or natural disaster the magnitude of which you are speaking.
feeling lonely? grab a balled up pillow for company
Encrypt it with your existing GPG/PGP keys, then move it to the drive. Most of the encrypted drives these days aren't that great. You'd also not have to worry about any proprietary software with you for the decryption.
Keeping your private GPG key would be useful - perhaps another drive? Perhaps on paper?
I like the idea of the USB drive for paperwork though, good addition to the EOTWAWKI (end of the world as we know it) scenario.
-- There is no sig line, only Zuul.
You could kill two birds with one stone, and get an iPod. That way you will not only have all of your important stuff, but you'll be able to groove to some sweet tunes while looting and pillaging.
I use an AES encrypted disk image on my USB flash drive. I used Disk Utility on Mac OS X 10.4 to create it. VERY easy. To insure security, I used a really long password. b1llg4t3s4ndm0nk3yb0y5uck
Damn...brb.
Why not just email all that to yourself in a gmail account? Holds 2.5GB and counting, and you can get to it from anywhere. No need to worry about taking it along with you.
In the event that another major American city is destroyed I doubt having all of your data on USB will be enough.
Just watch out for people trying to "brute force" your wife.
Also for my private data, I have a TrueCrypt volume on the drive so that in case someone gets their hands on it, my not so public data will be safe.
If you're actually intending to put your LIFE on it though also consider a backup strategy so you won't lose everything when your drive falls off your keychain and into the sewer where it's eaten by technologically advanced rodents.
Encrypt a blob of the data with a long passphrase on a PC, then store the scrambled blob on a thumbdrive. Then make 5 or more copies and send them to people around the world, preferably relatives, along with $20 each to cover return postage (to wherever you happen to land). Make sure to update the blobs every year or two to ensure the ID data is mostly current. Thumbdrives are cheap - rebuilding your identity after Katrina or some other Bush "oops" is much more expensive.
--
make install -not war
I ran into this easy to follow tutorial on setting up encrypted filesystems under linux, including virtual drives through loopback, and also entire devices/partitions/mount points: http://new.remote-exploit.org/index.php/Linux_encr ypt
Robert Bindler
A Computer Science student's views on technology.
Use Truecrypt (www.truecrypt.org). It's free, open source, and extremely secure (AES, Blowfish, CAST5, Serpent, Triple DES, and Twofish). I use it on my thumbdrive to backup all of my important data.
"Just the fax, ma'am."
I've cloned my start-up drive and all my files onto a 250 GB firewire drive (and several bare IDE HDs stashed in strategic locations). Given that I can order a new computer by 2 AM Eastern and have it delivered the same morning, I can be back in business in no time. I like cloned drives because you can retain all the OS and user preferences.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I hope you don't plan on copying the information once it's put on your flash card... :)
Which norrows your choices of weapons.
Perhaps a sling (if you have the time to practice).
I'm not sure about the legal status of black powder in NYC.
I'm also not sure about you status as a law abider, should you be on the smart side I'd suggest something in forty cal.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Here's what I can think of off the top of my head...
Social Security cards
Driver's licenses
Recent photos, head only and full body (clothed!)
Passports
Contact info of relatives, friends
Vehicle registration
Birth certificates
Wedding license
Property deeds
Will
Living will
Account and contact information: banks, credit cards, utilities, insurance (health, house, car), mortgages, loans
Edward Burr
Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool.
If there's a thermonuclear attack (classical nuclear war type) then your website, computer, usb thumbdrive etc should be the least of your worries.
Even if your many miles from g-zero the EMP from the airburst will pretty much write-off all your solid-state gear.
I'd think about stocking up the bits to build a vac tube radio (assuming anyone at the transmitting end has simmilar brains).
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
thumbs up to that comment. ughh... my thumbs smell funny.
How would you protect the flash drive if you had to swim for it? There's this cool new waterproofing technology called the ziploc bag. This technology can also give flash drives a positive buoyancy, just in case _it_ has to swim for it and leave your foundering ass behind.
Peter
Downsize DC Today!
Technology isn't the answer to everything. Why not just take your important stuff, or good copies of said stuff, and put it in a safe deposit box? Then you just have to take your key with you when you run out of your house. And even if you lose your key, they can drill it open for a (hefty) fee.
Really, why make it so complex by trying to put everything on USB drive and trying to figure out what encryption's best and scanning everything and...and...and... It's a waste of time.
I know it's terribly superstitious, but this is an excellent mindset to be in when you're in a position of responsibility (especially when you're feeling somewhat lazy). After all, the thing that goes wrong always seems to be the thing you forgot to plan for, or deliberately ignored, right?
A post a day keeps productivity at bay.
It's for Windows only, but I stumbled upon TrueCrypt found at http://www.truecrypt.org/ and really like it. And it's not only useful for USB drives, but can be used to create encrypted logical drives on a Hard Drive. For the really paranoid, the documentation even covers lots of stealthy ways to use it so as not to be detected.
I'm certainly no expert at encryption, but it seems pretty solid. Basically, it creates an encrypted container file and then mounts it as a logical drive when you open the file through the app. I've seen commercial counterparts such as StealthDisk, and I think TrueCrypt's interface is easier to use and its execution is more solid.
It's OSS and free as in beer and as in speech.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
I'm a 3D artist. My resume is my demo reel. As a result, I keep all the work I've done (i.e. 3D objects, textures, animations, etc..) plus I have uncompressed .AVIs I can quickly compose a demo reel of. There are gigabytes of info here. I have to keep that data around. If my apartment was suddenly destroyed, I'd be in trouble. So, yeah, I want to keep that data around and today a flash drive (today) won't do it. So what am I to do? Well, these recent hurricanes have me thinking about this problem. Newegg has USB 2.0 enclosures for laptop drives. For $100ish, you can get an 80 gig laptop drive. If you have about $120 to spend, this may not be a bad alternative for those with gigs of data they don't want to lose. I'm actually kicking around the idea of packaging one up and sending it to my family. They live in another state so it's unlikely we'd both have our homes wiped out. For somebody in my position.. well actually I should start on that tonight.
"Derp de derp."
But in mine, I put laminated copies of those documents, or in the case of the passport, it's in dual plastic baggies. I'd hate to be in a setting like the N.O. Superdome and have to say, does anyone have a computer that I can copy my electronic data onto?
No thanks. Some things are too important for that.
Now, for the post-crisis management phase, it makes perfect sense - assuming your usb keychain drive survives the journey back to your parents' house.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
I'm sorry to hear you live in NYC, were even such a *sensible* choice of a Winchester Lever in .38/.357 requires permitting and suchlike.
I'm a big fan of that caliber in lever actions, btw... 50 round boxes are cheap ( unlike deer calibers ) and it's still pretty dang useful for holding off the savages...
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
they suggest making a list of all of things like Social Security and credit card numbers, scanning birth certificates, marriage license and tax returns, and saving it all on a USB flash drive.
Why not just use a CD (full size, or 180 meg)? They are cheaper and more durable than a flash drive. Before I had my new, larger, flash drive I used to carry a 50 meg business card CD in my wallet. It would have to be replaced every 3-6 months from being repeatedly sat on :). I would imagine they would hold up better outside of the pocket, though :).
Since this would be a complete identity kit, encryption is of utmost importance. What's the best solution? A flash drive that claims to encrypt or a platform-independent, self-extracting, encrypted file on a regular drive?
I wouldn't use the software that comes with the drive. If I were doing this I would use GNU Privacy Guard. You should probably store the key in a safe location far away from home, and preferably with a strong passphrase.
Any suggestions for sturdy drives?
I currently have a PQI I-Stick. I have only had it about a year so far and I haven't doen anything stupid with it yet. It mostly just sits in my wallet in its little wallet case. I very much prefer keeping my flash drive in my wallet as opposed to my keychain. I also like that the little wallet insert will hold two drive. The only thing I dislike is that the wallet holder is so much thicker than the drive.
What other data would you put on this piece of "contingency hardware",
I have all of my revision control repositories mirrored to my flash drive and also any documentation or notes that I write. That is basically everything that I created myself and would have to do work to replace.
how would you protect the drive itself in case you did have to "swim for it"?
I would probably make sure the data was out of town before I was. Most of this data either doesn't change often (credit card numbers), or it never changes (SSN, birth certificates). Encrypt it, put it on some media of some sort, and send it out of town. Most people probably have friends or family living out of town that they can trust, send it to them. If this is not an option for you, you can probably get a box at a bank out of town I suppose...
Having just gone through this with Hurricane Rita, I filled a duffel bag with all the pertinent hard copies and emailed all my data files and insurance pictures to my own Gmail account.
I wrap my USB Flash Drive in bubble gum, then swallow it...saves for 7 years right inside me. Then when it digests, lather, rinse, repeat. Chip-
Put a complete set of identifying documents on microfilm, and embed it under your skin. Doesn't even have to be your identity, as long as it's complete.
Just don't go to the Mediterranean is all.
How immediate is the need for access to the information? The stronger the solution, the slower the access for the most part. Something that needs to be immediately accessable will need to be bundled with proper decryption tools (assume nothing better than Windows 95 will be available) on-stick.
Also related: what operating system are you using? Under Linux, you could use a loopback encrypted filesystem, for example, but under windows such would not be viable.
Are we assuming that the computer will be destroyed, or that we need to stick to a pure-RAM access system to prevent residue on the hard drive from being intercepted?
Are you willing to trust a corperate product for ease-of-use concerns?
Finally, how are you securing your original documents? Might it just be as easy to grab an organized safe-box as keep all the digital security on a digital form? Keep in mind that only origial copies are good for anything beyond having a reference point to start receiveing replacement copies of your stuff.
One more thing: How much of this is overkill? Keep in mind how cheap and simple it is to acquire copies of an arbitrary person's complete identifying information (I often see ways to do it under two hundred dollars, including original copies of all the usual certificates and plastic cards, which would cost less for a professional). A chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and in this case, with just some reasonable precaution, the path of least cost and difficulty is through more common means of aqusition than stealing a thumbdrive.
"Fight for lost causes. You may discover they weren't."
Why bother with a flash USB when you can just gmail the material to yourself? If you're paranoid, encrypt it beforehand, but I doubt someone who broke into google is going to poke inside your PDF attachments. Come on, someone must have said it already? Mod me redundant!
Protect your liberties. Donate to the ACLU
What would Batman put in his Bat-usb-flash-drive?
//WR
If you're really worried about durability, why not make a back up onto a CD-R/DVD-R in addition to your USB drive? They won't fry from static or water exposure, and they're arguably more compatible with PCs (despite the utter ubiquity of the USB drive, you'd be suprised at how many legacy PCs are still rattling around sans USB... especially in lower-level government offices - the sort of place where may someday need to prove your identity).
I can personally attest to having fried more than one USB flash drive from static buildup alone - enough miles in your pocket or bag with the protective cap off (which unfortunately happens rather frequently) will totally junk the drive. Nevermind the fact that the drives can be pretty fragile - doesn't take much to crush them or damage their USB interface.
Granted, the CD-R/DVD-R solution isn't perfect. They break, they scratch. But they're definately a worthwhile backup plan for your backup plan. I mean, if your whole aim is to build a universal contingency plan, then it doesn't make much sense to put all your eggs into one (semi-volatile and fragile) basket.
===== Warble://VX
I'm also not sure about you status as a law abider, should you be on the smart side I'd suggest something in forty cal.
22s may not have the stopping power of a 45. However, it's easier for people to shoot, with less recoil than a 45 most people, even small women, can shoot it repeatedly without resting. Also the gun itself is lighter. You can still get them in semi-auto with >=10 round clips. And from the point of the attacker, the are just as deadly; assuming they aren't wearing armor (in which case you are generally screwed either way unless you can do a headshot in which it really makes no difference).
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
First pillage, THEN burn!
I certainly wouldn't be wondering what I should be taking in these instances. I would be more concerned with ensuring the lives of my family and myself were safe. Government agencies, insurance companies, banks and other institutions have all your details on record anyway and shouldn't be too hard to reaquire in the event of a disaster or whatever. Sure you can store things on a USB drive, create photocopies and store them at the bank or any other multitude of methods to protect things but even then it's not always reliable. Those backups can get blown away aswell and then it was all for nothing. Not to mention, a lot of this information can change quite a lot during a lifetime and having to always update it is going to be a real pain, so in the event of a disaster where you have to make a run for it, your records may not be up to date.
You can't plan disasters so when you put off till tomorrow, updating your credit card numbers, a disaster will strike and you won't have your nice little backup as was intended.
If such a thing happen in Canada, imagine!!! No need to carry a flash USB drive, forget it! With our prime minister, I'm already dead.
Homeland security has a website called www.ready.gov that has built a whole website about preparing for emergencies. They also have an Emergency Financial First Aid Kit that includes a nice form that consolidates all the personal information you might need in order to get financial services in an emergency.
After getting the basic emergency kit ready, fill out and print this form and put it in your kit. Then, encrypt it and put save on internet, maybe mail it to your gmail account.
Assuming that your stuff is encrypted it should be pretty safe to put it almost anywhere.
1) Keep the latest copy on your iPod (or equivalent) if you tend to carry it all the time. That way you have it with you in case you can't go home.
2) Buy an extra USB drive and snail-mail it to your parents out in the boonies for safe keeping.
3) E-Mail it to yourself on Gmail or equivalent. But then I would double dog encrypt it. You may not want to put your most secret information there. But some of things could certainly go on there.
I would put all my ID stuff on there, all important papers and contracts, passport. Thumbprints and pictures of each other for the dreadful prospect that you may have to ID each other, or post pictures in the news paper for your partner. If you have any particular features such as a birth mark or a tatoo then it might be clever to take a picture of that as well. Medical records potentially. But you could also walk around and take pictures of your home for insurance purposes. All your important phone numbers and addresses to relatives.
If you are collecting all this information then you may want to invest the money in a fireproof safe as well.
Man, I didn't mean to sound so alarmist. I just thought it was a really great question.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
As others have pointed, more politely than I think they needed to, "In case of a nuclear war, nobody's going to give a damn." You'll be struggling just to live. So will everybody around you. Nobody's going to give a damn about your stupid keychain drive with the password to all your porno-sites on it. And if you make it to a part of civilization where you actually get to *use* the damn thing for it's intended purpose, being to recover your life's data, you'll be lucky to find somebody's computer with a compatible document format to read it, let alone figure out how to recover the data from your ultra-secure storage method.
Get a LIFE!
How about putting your important data somewhere online?
echo '123...testing...123' > test.txt
openssl enc -bf < test.txt > test.txt.bf
mv test.txt test.txt.orig
openssl enc -d -bf < test.txt.bf > test.txt
diff test.txt.orig test.txt
pimtamf
Personally, getting these things wet isn't that big of an issue. Or maybe I am luckier than the rabbit that didn't loose its foot. I have washed my USB key drive in the washing machine 3 times. Never have I lost any data to the spin cycle. For the record it is a 128 meg Kingston USB drive that our local community college gave out to all students and instructors.
Well, if you happen to get one wet, I wouldn't plug it in until it dries, and I would do it before it rusts.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
"flame" bait indeed...
One warning about some of these drives, though: Stay far away from any PNY stuff. I own two of their drives and recently their quality has been going downhill. I first got one of their USB 1.1 drives, and it was of decent quality. It was enclosed in a thick plastic shell that could (for some reason) slide off, but that wasn't a major concern because overall the drive was rugged. The bigest complaint about it was that you couldn't put it onto a keychain as it was.
I got their latest revision not too long ago (USB 2.0) and while they fixed the keychain problem, they messed everything else up too. Their drives are now in a THIN plastic casing. VERY thin. The plastic is so thin that they didn't even need to bother cutting out a slit for the LED because it bleeds right through the case! I had one of these for around a month until the area around the connector snapped making the drive very hard to use.
These drives seem to be common in CompUSA and Wal-Mart just so you know.
Take your file(s), zip them with a password and email them to yourself. That way:
1. You don't have to remember to grab your USB key or worry about breaking it.
2. You can access your important information anywhere that has an internet connection (I assume that the email account is a web based one).
3. If your email account has a descent password and your zip file has a descent but different password, your data should be pretty safe from bad guys.
what are some good sites for portable usb apps?
Hadn't thought of the otterbox (nice idea, makes sense). If your really trying to prep for something like this, consider making a non-magnetic copy also. While the odds of an EMP type disaster killing the drive (especially if stashed in a safe place) are slim, so are the odds of a nuclear disaster I guess.
Consider burning it to a CDR also. This is stuff that might have to be updated once a year (such as deeds or photos/contacts) anyway, so its not like the age of the media and deterioration will be a big problem.
A rule of thumb I've learned is that if your planning for stuff that occurs more then 2 standard deviations away from the mean, then chances are you want something that is (or can at least be considered virtually) full-proof. At the very least, the odds of all of the combined methods together have a lesser chance of failing then the original threat does of occuring.
We don't need an "overrated" so much as we need a "you completely missed the parent's point, dumbass..."
Have you Voted NO yet?
you had me at #!
There are plenty of on-line backup services. Not only do they let you store you data, they also give you web-based access if you like. A simple solution is Apple's .Mac, but there are others. You can automate the backup so that you don't have to keep things up to date by hand.
What members on slashdot will do is: build and deploy a satelite that cannot be GPS tracked to orbit around a random planet in another galaxy, with a 2^267709 bit encrypted drive storing the photos of their favourite pornstars.
They will spam all Nigerians with their SSN / CC# and birthpapers.
-Alex. http://bit.ly/1iVPtfA
Save your keyring by encrypting it separately, using a long but easy-to-remember passphrase. I use openssl and AES.
A more thoroughgoing solution is to give every file you want to preserve an unguessable ID, and use that as the passphrase for that document. Use a hash (SHA-1, typically) of the ID as the "name" of the document (i.e. the subject line when you email it to your gmail account). Make sure that the hash you use for the ID is different from the hash used to turn your passphrase into a key! (openssl uses MD5, so that's OK). A convenient hack for generating unguessable IDs is to use a hash of the file's content. Hash-based version-control systems like git make this trivial. (If you use this trick, you need to encrypt the list of IDs using a passphrase you can remember!)
I memorized my Social Security Number when I was 16. Recording it sounds like the stupidest idea ever. If someone *really* needs proof of who you are, the fact that you can recall the number from your head should be enough. Otherwise, just tell the government who you are and get a new card. It's not rocket science.
Ah. Scientologists.
astronut@debian:~$ echo '123...testing...123' > test.txt
astronut@debian:~$ openssl enc -bf test.txt.bf
enter bf-cbc encryption password:
Verifying - enter bf-cbc encryption password:
astronut@debian:~$ mv test.txt test.txt.orig
astronut@debian:~$ openssl enc -d -bf test.txt
enter bf-cbc decryption password:
astronut@debian:~$ diff test.txt.orig test.txt
astronut@debian:~$
No change.
Realize that if you die, you won't give a shit about any of that, so do nothing. Q.E.D.
Okay. Set up a off site linux server (in your grandparents basement or something) with a very good password and then set up encrytption that has another very good password. now anytime you need to find your information just log on to it using putty or w/e you think you need. You could also hide the flash drive in like....deodorant or something making it sneaky. So your at a airport and they ask for id pull out the B-O. Hide the papers inside of a thermos? That floats. So many ways to do this.
I've had 4 of my 512 mb usb mem key's go through the wash dozens of times.. :-) no problems there at all :-)
"Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far
Just get a drive that has password protection implemented as a locking mechanism on the drive. Unless you're afraid of an attacked pulling data directly off the chip (is the government after you?), encryption won't really buy you much except to slow everything down.
When they interview many of the Katrina NOLA refugees, a common regret is that they've lost family pictures. At this point there is no reason not to start scanning paper-based photos in high-resolution. I've been pursuing a long term project of scanning documents, family photos, certificates and so on -- and making two sets of copies of the DVD archives. One set goes to a safe-deposit box and the other gets sent out of state to a relative in Ohio (I'm in Maryland). Each disk has a printed list of contents attached to it.
Apart from my wanting these images to survive, they are an important part of my children's and my extended family's legacy.
-- Gary Goldberg KA3ZYW 301/249-6501 AIM:OgGreeb Digital Marketing Inc., Bowie, MD
I know I'm not the only one who has mistreated their USB Drive... My 32mb usb drive has been through the washer and dryer at least twice... It still works perfectly. My professor dropped his 128mb drive in the toilet, fished it out, rinsed it off, then let it dry. His still works.
Does anyone else have USB Flashdrive horror stories?
Why bother? I remember my SSN and my credit card numbers; after using these numbers 20 or 30 times, everybody remembers them. For other things (tax returns, birth certificates, etc) you can always get copies from the authorities.
rather /etc/* in fact... who wants to go thru all the configs once again which you have gathered from 100 different sources/forums/chats/etc!
"Coincidently, this morning the New York Times has an article about what to take when you have to leave home in a big hurry [DNA verification required], and they suggest making a list of all of things like Social Security and credit card numbers, scanning birth certificates, marriage license and tax returns, and saving it all on a USB flash drive."
What's the legal status of scanned documents?
I have been thinking about encryption options for files on a USB drive for a slightly different reason. I want to keep finical info like tax returns, investment records, etc. on a USB drive for the reason that if my box does get compromised then the stuff that could REALLY f%&k me over will not be on it. The basic idea is there is data I want to store digitally, but I don't want it on a computer that is connected to the internet 24/7.
So I'm really naive about encryption options and would like my data to be readable on Linux, OS X, and Windows at minimum. What options do I have besides a password protected zipfile? Are password protected zipfiles encrypted using the password as the key?
How reliable are USB drives? How many backups should I make?
Think Deeply.
I know this really isn't the topic, but I keep all my emergency info as both notes, and .docs on my ipod, and all of my important info (scans of drivers licence / cc numbers) pgp encrypted on my iPod aswell... I have it with me almost 100% of the time I am away from home, so if I need to leave in a hurry, I won't loose all my important stuff.
In nature, there are neither rewards or punishments, there are only consequences.
Why oh why can't I ever meet any women!! :(
Don't forget a recent copy of your prescription.
Somehow I did not expect much more from a guy named HungWeiLo. ;)
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
- The drive's presence
- The drive must be mountable (I test for
/lost+found on the drive to figure out when it's been successfully mounted (it's ext3 with a one-month/1000 mount fsck))
- The ssh private key, which lives on the drive, must be loaded with ssh-add
The automount timeout for the drive is 2 seconds, so I can pretty much unplug it at leisure. I put a call to run ~/bin/usb-storage-hook (as my uid) in the hotplug scripts, which in turn forgets the encryption key for the drive and xscreensaver-command -locks my $DISPLAY when the drive is unplugged. When I plug it back in and unlock xscreensaver, it wants the keys for the USB drive again. I load the keys with ssh-askpass-fullscreen, but there's a bit too much of a delay between prompting, mounting, and retrying, during which you can focus and input to other windows (think: xdm crash-restarting and logging in, key-by-key, on console), which I'm still working on.Sounds more complicated than it is, and there's still more stuff I have to do (move gaim-encryption and OTR stuffs to the drive and point symlinks, require the drive to boot, etc.), but this system makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.
Anyway, long story short, devmapper, automount, ext3. (Feel free to poke holes in my description, btw, I'm open to suggestions).
Hrm. Sure I've left something out...
And what happens if you forget your password, after having your emergency bag in the closet for a few years?
for compatability purposes, I would use windows based encryption. Just format the drive (ntfs) using a win2k box and then save the files to the drive using a winxp box. Encrypt the file in a separate folder on the drive using winxp sp2 encryption and then export the key to a common folder on the drive. You will be asked for a password to export the encryption key from winxp (admin tools, snap-ins) and save the key un-encrypted. To read the device load it into any windows based machine, import the key and provide the credentials and your done. Another way is to use a drive similar to the Lexar JumpDrive Secure. Its 256 AES encryption and works flawlessly on most machines. Anyone here who says not to trust manufacturers is smokin dope if they can think they can crack 256 aes easily. Ive tried both systems, i prefer the windows encryption method for simplicity. But trust the Lexar system as it loads the software automatically on most machines.
Read my TrueCrypt/Autoplay howto here.
The month and year I graduated from high school. Karen Velez. http://usedmagazines.com/titles/Playboy/1985/
The Luddites were ahead of their time.
Which flash drive has a big enough capacity for that??? :-)
Anyway, everything is stored in central computers anyway, who needs backup?
if your pants fit well, it's not only because of the pants
It will have your credit card and ID card in there. Possibly Social Security card if you carry it around with you.
Everything can be replaced.
If there is some huge disaster, just be happy you're alive. You can prove you were born later.
- double-barreled shotgun
- spiked hockey armor
- extra-hold hair products
- Auntie Entity's phone number
Freedom: "I won't!"
Why not use AxCrypt for free? Yes I realize that you would have to put the program on the stick as well as the encrypted files...
PGP to encrypt everything on my USB drive :) Works wonders...
My ideal 'out' kit;
My personal records are scanned in high-res PDF format and kept on a jumpdrive. Identicals are kept with both of my parents on identical hardware, and my grandmother holds the originals. (This includes my birth certificate, my SSN card, my high school diploma, last 3 years of 1040 forms, my insurance policies, my driver's license, my EMS certification, and a few odd bills here and there for 'proof of residence'.)
I keep a backpack packed with a dry pair of pants, fresh socks, two t-shirts, a sweatshirt, a bright orange-and-yellow 'RESCUE ME' vest, emergency self-inflating flotation device (rated to 225 lbs), 4L of drinking water, 6 MREs, a space-warmer blanket, air-activated hand-warmers, a flashlight, batteries, sweedish-firesteel, 600$ cash, a rescue strobe light, a leatherman, a wide-band two-way radio and scanner, a GPS reciever, a universal hand-crank charger, a map, a compass, pencil, paper, an emergency contact card, and the aforementioned USB keychain.
It's not a huge bag, one just has to know how to pack. I do not live in the countryside by any means, but I travel through such areas often, and you never really know where you're going to end up if you need help quickly.
I also keep a proper EMS bag (affectionately known as the 'blue bag') in my trunk, as well as a large ammocan with more space blankets, MREs and fresh drinking water. The assumption is that I'm not alone in the car, and we have to create a shelter-in-place.
Worse-comes-to-worse, eat someone.
Informatus Technologicus
You can't laminate social security cards. I don't know why since getting fakes or copies can't be too hard. I'm not sure if this would apply to other documents like birth certificates or not.
Waterproof bags would be your best bet.
I like bcrypt for such things for a number of reasons:
1) It uses blowfish encryption, which is Good Enough for most purposes.
2) It's command-line driven
3) It's tiny
4) It's self-contained
5) It's portable
I have binaries and libraries for bcrypt on my USB keychain that run on Linux, Windows, Solaris, and HP-UX. I should add OS-X on there one of these days too. It hardly takes up any space, so I still have most of that 512MB available for data.
I just wish it followed the same command syntax as Unix crypt. Ah well.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Actually, a total disaster is a good time to get a new identity and walk away from all your debt...
Oh well, what the hell...
In case of a natural disaster, FEMA will have no clue how to read a flash drive, nor will they care or be properly equiped for it. Anything other than an original Social Security card, drivers license, birth certificate, etc are useless.
Scan the important photos and put those on CD or something. Stash it all in one place and don't forget where it is.
By the way, in case of nuclear war, nothing electronic will work and you probably will be dead anyways, so it doesn't matter then.
Well done. Now see if you can do it in fewer lines.
The H&K USP .40 is the finest handgun I've personally ever fired. It's small and light enough to be practical while still carrying the stopping power of the .40 round. And yes, even the little girls can shoot it. Although in a practical situation, if you have to shoot your gun more than a couple of times, you've got a very big problem on your hands.
.22 to the head is far from lethal, incidentally. In most cases, you won't even penetrate the skull unless you're lucky enough to hit it at a perpendicular angle. The world is full of people who took .22 rounds to the braincase and lived to tell the tale, or even walked away with nothing more than a nasty scratch.)
(A
I highly recommend TrueCrypt for your encryption needs. It essentially creates an encrypted file of a desired size which you can copy wherever you like, which the application mounts like a removable drive when you need to encrypt/decrypt stuff. The program even has a traveller mode that you can run without installation. Only requirement is that you have admin rights on the PC.
.just make sure the drive is in a ziploc bag :)
Oh, and if you do have to swim for it. .
After a really big disaster, there wont be any computers or records left, the whealth would be worth nothing, a piece of rotten food will be more valuable than a ton of gold or a billion dollars, it will be the end of capitalism aw we know it, we will go back to a stateless society, primitive anarchism, nobody would care about records or money anymore, the survivors will be happy to be alive.
when the competition started lobbing warheads at us I would tender my resignation.
At the publishing headquarters building of the Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
"The building's being bombed!" -Roosta
"Wha....Who would want to bomb a publishing company?!?" -Zaphod
"Another publishing company." -Marvin the Paranoid Android
I've been thinking about this and the bigger issue of backups lately and was considering what it would be like to do "miniature" versions of all my photos and video - whatever it takes to make them fit onto one big flash drive. I have a few hundred gigs of photos and video on my raid at home and it would take some serious crunching, but if it's all I had left, I think I'd still prefer a little 320x240 video or photo over nothing.
Until the net is faster, syncing 100s of megs of data back and forth weekly or monthly (or 100s of gigs for a full backup) is just going to be prohibitive. I am doing firewire drive backups and sometimes carrying them off-site, but if the "big one" hits I'll probably lose a lot.
- Pat
It was George Carlin.
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
Consider cryptographic secret-sharing schemes. You split up data into m parts, and require that at least n of them be brought together to recover the secret. It's kind of like cryptographic RAID. It might not be practical for most of the data that we store, but it's certainly an interesting idea. It would be difficult for a small group of people to get together and recover your secret, and difficult for a small group of people to hold out and prevent the secret from getting out when it should. The ratio of n and m is adjusted based on the risk analysis of the two attacks. I first read about this idea in Schneier's Applied Crypto book, but wikipedia comes through:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_sharing
Keep in mind that whether or not you need encryption, whether or not you need offsite storage, whether or not you need physically-accessible data should the Internet become available... all these things depend on the data you're trying to protect, and the disasters you're trying to protect against. Flinging buzzwords at your data doesn't necessarily do anything useful to protect it.
--
"Extra Anus Kills Four-Legged Chick" -- Headline
Just google for "Bug Out Bag". You'll find numerous discussions in other forums and newsgroups covering this topic. None of them will recommend a USB flash drive for a simple reason: How will you use it if you don't have something to plug it into?
I had a Lexar Jumpdrive (Secure). Specifically the model with the rubber grips on the sides. It had been through the washer and dryer and survived this abuse. A few months later I dropped my keys after getting out of the car and it finally died. A small capacitor inside had been knocked loose rendering it unusable. I kept it for a while after this happened...
Finally, one late night I cracked it open and carefully soldered the capacitor back in place. Then I clumsily superglued it back together, and it worked without a hitch! All my data was in tact. So I backed up everything to my hard drive. Since, I had it "rigged" back together in such a clumsy fashion, the capacitor finally worked it's way loose a couple weeks later. At this point, I just decided to get a new one, with twice as much capacity. Same model, and I still have this one.
As far as durability this one will last through some heavy duty abuse. However, if you are looking for security DO NOT rely on their software as it has been demonstrated to be insecure. Encrypt important data with something like PGP or GPG. Someone will need your private key and your passphrase (choose a strong one) in order to decrypt the data. So the security aspect of that is something you have, and something you know.
/^([Ss]ame [Bb]at (time, |channel.)){2}$/
if you didn't crush the IC that the flash memory was on (most USB drives tend to be single chip systems anyway), your data should be fine against water. Last time I checked the black plastic packaging of the IC wasn't affected by water; just dry it off before plugging it into a USB port. Then again, that's only to the best of my understanding.
If there was a hurricane or something giving some warning I'd grab my external hdd with weekly backup. For and "emergency" backup I'd go with whatever the most durable flash card happens to be. Scan all the important documents I have, proof of citivenship, residence, whatever else and cover the case with a few layers of DuckTape. Waterproof, shock resistant and small enough to fit in a pocket or onr of the suposedly extra durable USB drives, the rubber coated ones claiming to be extra shock resistant and waterproof. But that would only work if I was home at the time. I hear bank vaults are designed to survive nuclear blasts. With scanned document being not that large, no need for a high resolution scan, just identifiable and readable. I may condider keeping a heavily encrypted copy on the every-day drive. If I want it to be a useful backup, I may keep it on a swissbit/swiss memory pocket knife/flash drive. Yes, even if the tool part is less usful than my keychain sized leatherman.
-AND/OR-
find a trusted close relative living many many miles away and give them an encrypted copy
F7 doesn't work, ignore spelling and grammar
...don't forget to pillage some additional batteries for the iPod. ;)
The filesystem is the package manager
www.memoryexpertsinc.com makes a cool usb drive that uses a fingerprint biometric to secure files with 256 bit AES encryption. It has a pubilc partition and private partition.
But hauling around a bulk of your info on a key chain isn't that bad an option. 99% of the people who find it couldn't get thru the basic PW access that most flash drives provide.
And having the info you need would still be a pretty darn handy thing, when you needed it. I'm not sure it's any worse than having your insurance card, 3 or 4 credit cards, your bank card, or anything else you may carry around in your wallet.
It's just a different media than paper. One that holds more. No harm there, any worse than carrying around a ream of printed material.
shoot the hostage
I have done a fair amount of canoeing/rafting and have some wilderness medical training so the need to keep important things dry and protected is something that I have had some experience with. I have been most happy with this hard case it is completely waterproof and you can see what's in it (this is actually useful). It is also fairly small which is nice. I recently went to Africa so I wanted to be able to communicate. I was able to pick upa quad band mobile phone (as well as a satellite phone), which worked well in cities and surprisingly far out into the bush.
The phone and charger fit well inside the case along with a small knife/multitool, and laminated (and shruken) copies of all of my important documents (visa, passport, list of important contacts). It would not be hard at all to fit all of that and a small USB drive in that space. The hardcase is also a better bet than something soft for really important stuff. In a wilderness/emrgency situation you really want to make sure than any gear you do take with you is protected. Also the hard copies of the documents is a hugely good idea in an emergecy where computer availability could be scarce/swamped.
There are a lot of waterproof bags and cases, and they all tend to be well reviewd by people that beat the hell out of them (outdoor enthuisits). I higly reccomend a small hard case over a soft case for electronics. If you do your homework its pretty much a no brainer. Also if you are really serious make sure to test the gear. Put some toilet paper in it and dunk it in water, beat the hell out of it, leave it outside when its cold and hot. That way you can see how much it takes to pop open a case underwater or what conditions cause condensation etc. Then you will really know if your protection works.
Being able to set things on fire is kind of handy too.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Click here or here.
I managed to eacape from an East European country without anything, no passport, no PhD, DSc certificates or any other documents. Months later I managed to come to the US. After many unsuccsessful attempts to find an academic job, I eventually managed to get hired by a small university based only on the testimonies of three fellow American scientists who met me before and knew my work and a few photocopies of some of my publications.
Records are not always necessary, good, generous people can help you.
The site http://www.no-install.com/ has lots of applications to put on your USB flash drive including a bunch of different encryption applications. It would also be nice to have other applications with your saved settings on it as well like; Portable Firefox web browser with all your bookmarks, Portable Thunderbird email client with saved emails (this can be very important if you have saved emails for financial, medical, etc sites), an instant messenger client with your saved buddy list to notify people of your whereabouts and health, etc.
I've been trying to think of a device suitable for such a situation for awhile now, although from a slightly different angle. The question is: if you had to take a very large amount of textual and perhaps audiovisual data with you, in a convenient and lightweight and protective format, what would it be?
First thing that comes to mind is a type of palm pilot device. This is the smallest, easiest way to transport a large amount of text (at minimum), in a very small and light format, and with the ability to read under dim conditions as bonus (backlight). You could store all the basics, from first aid info to maps to the personal info cited in the story write-up. However a palm pilot has two shortcomings: not enough memory and it needs power. The power situation is fairly easily rectified - palm devices are very efficient to begin with and you can charge them in a (bright) day with portable solar (like an iSun or comparable). Memory, little trickier but do-able; the device needs to accept some kind of card media. Buy as many as you need room for. Put the whole thing in a watertight shockproof case and you have a not bad solution for storing and accessing a lot of data in wilderness conditions.
Thing is, they stopped making palm devices that have any sort of regular battery system a long time ago. They all have internal rechargeable now. I have an old Handspring Visor that is very close, but monochrome (maybe a good thing, esp. for daylight reading) and lacks any real amount of memory. You could charge it via solar by way of car adaptor or some other crap but that is inelegant and cumbersome.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
Now if there's a nuclear attack im not going to care about any of this, but most likely a more run-of-the-mill disaster will come my way sometime, Los Angeles has some fires going at the moment and that Big Shaker is waiting down below. So I set up an old spare computer with a big HD inside a removable enclosure, like this one http://www.compusa.com/products/product_info.asp?p roduct_code=282701&pfp=SEARCH where I will backup the important data from other computers via rsync, mainly /home directories and mp3s. In case of emergency or if I'll be away for some time, I turn a little key, pop it out, and take that drive with me or leave it somewhere safe, all my important stuff can be lugged without having to take all the computers or waste time trying to get HDs out.
It's not too big and it will hold alot more data than a usb drive. Besides, credit cards, birth certs, DMV docs, etc have their own backup at the proper offices, those are the least of your concern. But all those emails, documents, and pictures you've collected, nobody has a copy of those. You'll appreciate having them when your whole life is going up in a flaming inferno! Just a thought, EL CHAVO!
Es que se me chispotio!
How is having scans of these documents on a USB key better than keeping them in one envelope together, ready to grab when it's time to scram? Last I checked, a scan of a birth certificate no more valid (ie, NOT) than a photocopy, and extra effort to display. Use your backpacks as the file cabinet for your marriage license, passport, etc, and your USB key as the backup for your emails. Really.
with all personal information possible stuck to a small, portable LCD monitor.
Flash can survive being submersed just fine as long as you dry it out before using it. But the USB flash drives seem likely to get mechanically messed up because of the way they stick out. I didn't get to use mine that long before it got pried the wrong direction by accident and went "crunch," so now I just use CF and SD cards. Of course, if you don't use it a lot, only often enough to keep the documents up-to-date, maybe it won't be a problem.
Transflash or SmartMedia would be sturdier. But SmartMedia is obsolete and transflash is so small that it's very easy to lose.
You could just store the docs on your cellphone and plan not to lose it, or store on a memory card which is in your cell phone. But then the memory will get used more and be more subject to wearing out.
iButtons are about the sturdiest format there is, and they have encrypted ones too, but they don't have enough memory for much data. There are also flash-based smart cards you could keep in your wallet. But neither of those is common enough - it's hard to find a reader for them, harder than finding a usb port anyway. Smartcards _should_ be standard equipment for securely storing all your passwords and personal info, but it hasn't caught on, mostly because of paranoia about "big brother" or "mark of the beast" or identity theft or some such.
Maybe you could pop open an SD card, fill the empty space with epoxy and put it back together. It would probably be more durable that way. Or, do the same with a USB drive. Or use the SD card by itself most of the time, and keep a compact new USB SD reader in your knapsack.
Yeah somebody should be manufacturing a really tiny usb key that has encrypted flash, implements some smart-card-like protocols for partitioning information with different keys, and sticks out of the port less than 1 cm, and is very sturdy. Having it stick out less would reduce the leverage when it gets bumped against something.
Another great flash drive if you're looking for something sturdy, is the "Corsair Flash Voyager". It was rated 8/10 on the Ars Technica flash drive roundup, and it is actually encased in rubber.
While this may not have the rock hard connotations of words like "Titanium", it is an excellent choice if the sturdiness of the drive is important. You can throw it against walls, bounce it on floors, and even submerge it in a glass of water and it will still work! While I don't actually have first-hand experience of this, it seems very possible if it is completely encased in rubber.
Of course, actually doing this probably isn't recommended, but if this does happen to the drive, it will still work. While it doesn't get any points for its looks, it is probably one of the best drives out there if you're concerned about how much abuse it can take!
Another great flash drive if you're looking for something sturdy, is the "Corsair Flash Voyager". It was rated 8/10 on the Ars Technica flash drive roundup [arstechnica.com], and it is actually encased in rubber.
While this may not have the rock hard connotations of words like "Titanium", it is an excellent choice if the sturdiness of the drive is important. You can throw it against walls, bounce it on floors, and even submerge it in a glass of water and it will still work! While I don't actually have first-hand experience of this, it seems very possible if it is completely encased in rubber.
Of course, actually doing this probably isn't recommended, but if this does happen to the drive, it will still work. While it doesn't get any points for its looks, it is probably one of the best drives out there if you're concerned about how much abuse it can take!
> if your planning for stuff that occurs more then 2 standard deviations away from the mean
If ever there was a sentence fragment that illustrated the "intelligent idiocy" of slashdorks, this is it. Learn to spell, dumbass.
Make a 3MB disk image, AES-128 encrypted image, drag n' drop data to it. Copy to USB drives, and then email the 3MB images (however many you have) to yourself
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
"Condensing Your Life on to a USB Flash Drive?
Wait, I'm pretty sure I've seen this movie before... Or was it a book? Wait! No! An anime! Ghost in the USB or something...! (ok, so the title was bad)
You need a FREE iPod Nano
credit and various other id cards can be easily photographed. A negative can
survive a lot and still be usuable while a thumb drive might not. If I were
to go electronic I would go with a compact flash over the thumb drive. Of
course you'll need a reader, but they are pretty wide spread now a days.
Go to a canoe/kayak store. They sell heavy duty plastic bags with multiple-fold water-tight seals in a variety of sizes. These are much tougher than baggies or ziplocs and better sealed. Naturally, they're also terrific to have on canoe trips.
sigh, thang kod for +6 Flamebait.
It is entirely focused on records. This is the information age, right? So we need our personal information to survive, right? As I've already posted the information might well turn out to be important, and you should make sure you have it, but if Katrina taught anybody anything it's that papers don't insure your survival. You can't eat your papers (although when things get really, really sticky you might be able to trade them for food).
.money. If you don't, more gorp. When push comes to shove people will trade you nearly anthing for food. Money weighs less than gorp though. If you have your choice don't stay civilized. Head for the woods. Cities are a barren desert when it comes to survival. The woods have everything you need to survive (these days even including manufactured items, more's the pity). Cities often do not. Cities are also full people. Being full of people stretches resources so they don't have things in 'em anymore. People are also nasty sumbitches who will hit you over the head and take your precious personal information, encrypted or not (they don't find out how well you encrypted your information until after they have hit you on the head).
What you really need in that pack:
A good, sturdy pocket knife. Not a Swiss Army jobber. A single blade, like are sold to hunters. Metal, not ceramic.
A metal spoon.
Cheap chopsticks.
Do not, literally upon pain of death, use any other utensils than these to prepare or eat your food if you can at all avoid it. Make it a religion to keep them clean and sanitary.
Strike anywhere matches in a waterproof safe.
A firestarting piston. Use this before you resort to using your matches. Learn how to use it before you leave home.
A personal water filter.
A bottle of alcohol. 190 proof vodka is 190% better than the stuff from the drugstore. Make it yourself if you have to. Learn about cold distilling if you want to take the long, but easy way.
A few ounces of honey is nice to have along, but this is the most dangerous stuff in the pack. Think hard about it before including it. You can eat it if you have to, but that's not what it's here for.
Aspirin.
Antihistimines.
Any other drugs you personally need to stay alive. If you really need Prozac or Valium to stay alive, plan on dying.
A homemade soda can stove.
A mini roll of duct tape.
5 pounds of gorp. If tightly rationed this well feed you for a week.
An "Emergency Blanket."
Ziploc Baggies (These last two items are the only survival gear of note invented in the 20th century).
A camelback water resevior recently filled with known good water.
100 feet of parachute cord. Learn how to tie knots before you need to.
Wool cloth. Two shirtweight peices 45"X 72". One heavier weight 60"X108". These are your clothes, your hammok, your chair, your carryall, your. . .
Learn how to use them as such before you need to. Do not be tempted to substitute cotton for wool to save money. The savings could kill you. Not in a pleasant way either.
Two pair of wool socks.
Three yards of 36" wide cotton could come in hand as well. This is your hat, your belt, your shoulder bag, your sling, your . . .
A waterproof, windproof shell. Yes, even if you're in a tropical zone.
A pennywhistle. Yes, I'm dead serious about that one. Learn how to play it a bit before you leave home. Even better, also learn how to make a pennywhistle out of any tubular thing you can find, before you need to.
If you expect to stay "civilized". .
Two weeks with me showing you how to combine all this stuff with stuff you can find anywhere (like pebbles), especially in a disaster zone, otherwise you're just going to be in deep shit within an hour anyway.
Time with me is limited. Start poking around the internet for this information now. For God's sake, learn to take care of yourself. Any baby cockroach can do it. Your brain is bigger. Learn to use it for somthing other than tracking your stock portfolio.
KFG
A rule of thumb I've learned is that if your planning for stuff that occurs more then 2 standard deviations away from the mean, then chances are you want something that is (or can at least be considered virtually) full-proof.
At least slashdot is "full-proof" against FOOLS like yourself.
If bad puns were like deli meat, this would be the wurst
encrypt using zero crypt, it is freeware and can make self-extracting encryption files using just a password
Good call. Dual-purpose if you own a revolver, sturdy, reliable and very useful with a carbine barrel (16" BATF approved version, of course).
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
-- Pablo Picasso
"tape it to your chests so your bodies could theoretically be ID'ed if you were to die" -Chimera512
If I'm dead, I very much doubt I'll be concerned with them IDing my body.
Living in New Orleans has burned a few lessons into me.
First, make a list of things to take if you have to evacuate. I forgot several things when packing up at 3am the day before the storm hit.
Second, keeping a safety deposit box in the same area as your house is a bad idea. We have banks which have been closed for a month and will probably be closed for many more. People come in every day asking about when they can get it. People wanting to leave the country but can't get their passports, very bad news.
Third, keep a decent supply of water and canned food. Rotate the supplies to keep them fresh but always maintain one weeks worth of supplies. Figure at least one week before outside relief gets to you. Two weeks would be a safer bet. It's easier to do than you think. A water dispenser with 3 or 4 bottles should hold you over nicely and large cans of food from Chef Boyardee will make this very inexpensive. To use those cans, make sure you have a mechanical can opener on the assumption of no electricity. Keeping a 12 pack of Toilet Paper around doesn't hurt. If anyone asks why the large amount, simply say that you get it cheaper.Keeping some cash also doesn't hurt a bit. When the power is out, checks and debit/credit cards are worthless. Multiple things can happen outside of a nuclear war or hurricane which can force you to be self-sufficient for a week or two. Trust me, when the lights don't work, the police won't answer 911 calls and people are looting, you will be forever grateful you took a little time and money to be prepared.
Fourth, paranoia can be a good thing. My wife complained when I bought a generator and 40 gallons of gas at the start of hurricane season. She gave me even more grief when I bought canned goods and water we didn't need within the next week. She sat on the sofa while I boarded up my house like world war III was coming to New Orleans. She thanked me several times for doing all of the above when we had electricity, food, water and an unlooted house after the storm.
Personally, I send all of my files to both Gmail and Yahoo. I have seperate accounts set up just for those files. If a disaster befalls the US that takes out both of those companies and destroys my home computer on the other side of the country, losing computer files won't matter a bit, I'll be too busy trying to survive.
"We Didn't Start The Fire" by Billy Joel. It is important to have the right soundtrack for any event.
Too bad it will only last 2 years max.
Of course I haven't RTFA, but If the situation is so dire that I won't be able to return, government documentation is the last of my concerns.
My kit is more survival oriented. Backpack, bivy sack, gun, ceramic water filter, flint and knife. Anything else I need can be improvised, or taken by force.
In these situations, lots of people will be without papers. I want to be among them, rather than amongst the dead holding their encrypted USB drives detailing their last morgage payment, car loans, etc.
For basic, basic information, why not engrave it on a medic-alert-type bracelet? That way if you're ever rendered unconscious (or god-forbid, dead), at least you're identifiable.
Last post!
try replacing the semicolon with &&
Not to pee on your parade or anything but I'm really wondering if say a PDF scan of your documents will be useful. I can't imagine being able to submit a digital copy of a birth certificate if you want to get a replacemnt passport or something. I'm sure they will want the actual document.
... Because you never know when you'll need to bribe some hippies for their tie-dye painted 1 speed. And even if you have rice krispy treats and ding-dongs, you know, you just know; that with enough weed to give them the munchies you could hardball them for their mexican poncho and all natural soap.
an encrypted USB stick is gonna be an extremely useful tool for medics, forensics, etc. That is, if they can crack the code by the time you bite the bullet. Otherwise it's just gonna be a useless piece of plastic you've been carrying around giving you that nice and warm "I feel safe" feeling. Seriously, what's the use of encrypting the stuff you *want* other people to be able to read?
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. -- Andrew S. Tanenbaum
Rationale: The 256MB edition has a hardware switch for write protect. My 1GB version doesn't have that.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plausible_deniability b ility.php l
http://www.kavinay.com/dictionary/plausible_denia
http://www.fpif.org/briefs/vol3/v3n20hri_body.htm
Doesn't it suck to live in such fear? Maybe you should start thinking about living in some other country.
CDR, hah!
I have plenty of rotting CDRs that are showing data damage (MPEG movies tends to deteriorate rather quickly when CDR rot occurs). Although I don't exactly store it in ideal condition, it isn't exposed to high heat or high humidity.
I'd say somehow opening a safe deposit box in a country unlikely to be attacked (yes they do exist, try Canada or Switzerland), or hell, even just the other side of the country in the suburbs, and sticking a copy of important docs in there should be enough. If there's a I'm never going to be able to return to event happening, you're not likely to live through it. If you do, you'll have the time to pick up the stuff from wherever you stashed it.
Or you could simply vote for someone who isn't so bloody warmongering would help prevent those type of events from happening in the first place.
Instead of making a list of your credit card numbers, why don't you, oh, I don't know... take your credit cards with you? It's not like they are difficult to carry around or locked up somewhere that you can't get at them - you carry them around with you normally FFS!
Why not just save your "important" data on a drive mounted in a removable IDE drive bay. If you ever need to take everything, you just shut down the machine and take the drive... Yes, this may be a little heavier than a USB flash drive... You could build a set of cron jobs (like I have) to back up your important directories to the removable drive on a nightly basis...
"Documents and Settings" for a Windoze box
"/var/mail" for Linux
User directories under Linux
Bookmarks, Mail Client directories (Thunderbird, Evolution, etc), IM directories (GAIM, Trillian, Google Talk, etc)
This would probably be preferable to say an external USB/Firewire drive, because it would be much faster for standard operations and would be connected until you took it with you...not to mention, there's more you can do for a damaged harddisk than a damaged USB flash drive...hard drives are sealed...most flash drives are not...there's a whole industry built on recovery of harddisks...not so on flash drives (not yet...it's probably coming)...
Or better yet, why not use one of the GMail Filesystem. This would certainly be more likely to survive...you wouldn't need to "grab" anything...all you would need is a machine with web access...keep something like 7-zip for Windows, GPG (or what ever you used to encrypt the data), and the GFS software for Windoze and Linux...you wouldn't really even need the archives, just a "draft" message with links to the files/projects. You could use another online filesystem and mirror the accounts (don't use software raid, just use 2 devices), so you could always recover the data if you lost access to one account.
But then again, what ever happened to the idea of keeping a safety deposit box in another city??? You can get to it once you are "safe"...not to mention that the authenticity of "scanned" copies of documents would be questioned because of Photoshop/Gimp...with a safety deposit box, you could have notarized, physical copies...Many of the things you list are things that you really don't need at home and generally wouldn't mind driving to get when/if the need arises (SSN, wills, Birth Certificates, Tax Returns, negatives of family photos, etc)...which would make a much more difficult situation easier for you (knowing that your important personal documents were safe)...who wants to worry if the only scan of their birth certificate was going to survive when they themselves are in danger...not me...
If you DO go with the USB Key idea, then don't trust any of the "built-in" security schemes and use your own encryption and buy 2 and use software RAID to mirror the drives. That way the data could be rebuilt if either one fails...you could each carry one of them as well...in case something happened to the other one...also beware of the pitfalls of flash memory (limited number of writes comes to mind right away)...
Any idea of saving hardware is moot if you're thinking of a flood in a major city (like NYC), because even waterproof hardware would be destroyed by all of the chemicals that would be floating in the water...
Get the SanDisk Cruiser Titanium. I have one of these and am very impressed with it. It has a hard shell and the usb connector retracts into the device, unlike the other drives who have a cheap plastic cap that most people loose in a week. As for data secerity, Us GPG to encrypt the contents to a self extracting encrypted archive or just encrypt the data and store a copy of GPG on the drive with the data. If you have more data to backup than what will fit on a thumbdrive then there is the option of an external HDD case. This allows you to place a 300gb hard drive in an external usb enclosure. when the flood waters come you can grab the drive and run.
The music player choice means it is always with you. If you have a waterproof "sport" case for it even better. A reason to get that new 80 Gig iPod (wait for a few days) as a corporate expense. It is your backup drive. :) Just put a virtual encrypted disk image like PGP Disk had and off you go. Drag and drop your life.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
In the event you find yourself swimming, I'd seal the drive in a Ziplock baggie.
So there you are, laying unconscious on the pavement. Luckily the brave military man finds you before you die. The first thing he does is put your USB stick in his computer to see if you have any dangerous deseases that he should know about. But, since you were so obsessed with privacy and encrypted all your data, he is unable to read yuor stick. He injects you with the standard elixer of life, for which you happen to be allergic. You die after a few minutes of agonizing pain.
-- Cheers!
and does it come with a warrenty?
What exactly is your family's legacy? I understand wanting to preserve family portraits for one, two, or maybe even three generations, but after that it is pointless. It's just useless data taking up space. Think about it. You most likely remember your father (especially if he is still alive). You probably have fond memories of your grandfather. You might even have very faint memories of your great-grandfather. One day, unless you hit it big in some way (fame, money, power, etc), you are doomed to the same fate as your great-great-grandfather: at best a name and picture on a family tree; at worst a forgotten memory. I have just never understood the whole deal with genealogy. I just don't get it.
Pelican makes some small cases designed for items like cell phones, digital cameras etc.
They also make larger cases often used to protect sensitive equipment from harse environments. Their cases are designed to be waterproof and bomb proof. They have air pressure valves to compensate for changes in air pressure, and they can withstand a car driving over them.
Very tough stuff, i'd try their small case to protect a usb key with that kind of info on it. It should keep such a key protected from pretty much everything. And if you have other things to protect you'd probably want to look at their normal size cases.
Condensing Your Life on to a USB Flash Drive?
:-)
Well, if it doesn't fit on one, buy in bulk
Excuse me, but no. In this case, you're the one who's wrong. That's a perfectly valid phrase. It means that something is fully proof against anything that could possibly happen to it.
Note that this is dramatically different from "fool-proof" which applies more to processes.
Symetrical crypto. has pretty good solutions to keep data secure : all it needs is a secret. Use AES, get any decent key, and *learn it* (no whining here) in whatever form you'll find suitable. I found that learning a 128b keys in a pronounceable form is quite easier than I expected.
./favcrypto, publish the data on internet, and forget about storage.
Once your data is crypted with your
I always knew that those script kiddies with the see-thru lexan cases would come to a bad end...
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Seriously, storing the PGP file in a bunch of places around the world is probably the best bet.
Best Buy can have you arrested
Is it possible to make a raid array of opitcal drives that you've burned identical copies of so that you could reconstruct a complete set of media from multiple damaged copies? That would be cool, you know. You and your family could all keep copies of each others backup CD's.
Don't forget to scan all your family photos and all the photos from your parents collections of you and your siblings. Scan high resolution like 600 DPI.
Scan examples of the work that you have done. Source code, schematics, written documentation, blueprints, photos, letters of recommendation. Include these with the family photos and financial info. Don't forget medical records (remember also childhood immunizations and disease records, ask your parents if you don't have them) and hi-res scans of any X-Ray photos and dental records if you have them.
Buy or borrow a DVD recorder and copy all your photos, along with high resolution scans of birth certificates, tax returns, property deeds, financial records, etc. onto many copys of DVD ROM of all this data. Encrypt only the sensitive financial data. Make a copy of your and your family member's finger prints. Be sure to encrypt these before writing them to the disk. Make recordings of your voice. Record your spouse. Record your kids. Shrink these recordings into MP3 and OGG files (high quality 256KBPS) and include them on the disk. Not sure what to say? Dictate a will. Make a list of all your possessions. Include serial numbers, descriptions, digital photos, and estimated value. X sweaters, Y pairs of underwear, ect.
When you've done all this stuff listed above, make many copies of the CD/DVD-ROM. DVD-ROM blanks and CD ROM blanks are very cheap now (about 50 cents or less) and they can hold a great deal of information and photos. Send a copy each to your parents and spouse's parents.
Keep a copy of this disk in your car. If you get hit with a big disaster and have to get away quickly, you most likely will not remember to gather this stuff or you may have forgotten where your 'life disk' is located.
I'm not sure if this applies to you but sooner or later it applies to most people. If you are 'illegal', no proper immigration documentation, no passport, expired visa, fugitive from computerized bench arrest warrants regardless of how long ago it was issued, or if you are at risk of arrest because of lifestyle (you sell weed for a living) or are a political activist in a dictatorship, you might consider creating a complete new and separate identity for yourself. And keep the paperwork for this identity on a CD-ROM, encrypted of course. Put a few soft-core porn pictures (be sure to use ones that are not illegal) unencrypted on the CD in case you are forced to display the contents of the CD to the police (resulting from a search at a traffic stop or a random police stop-and-frisk on the street). You may want to have this info on a 512K Flash Disk (or a 3.5 inch mini CD) that you can carry with you at all times. If you are undocumented or a fugitive, you may find that you have to escape without being able to go back to your home to get your papers, contacts, or alternate identity papers. In this case, having a flash disk with a complete new identity on it is a big help in maintaining your freedom.
Shalom
Yeah, she really is, because DVD+R media is *SO* fashionable at cocktail parties. Psha, didn't you know? Where *have* you been??
I know you can rough it with leaves and stuff, but come on, you've got a ton of other stuff to worry about. Why add an abraded arse to it?
How many insurgents does it take to change the lighbulb? Anybody? Anybody?
CDs more robust than flash drives?
What have you been smoking?.
Flash is nearly unkillable.
CDs, otoh, need just a bad scratch and they are done for. COULD be happening in an "shit happens" scenario like descriped in the article... Not to mention that for me, CD-Rs showed the habbit of becoming sponaniously unreadable after a few months/years quite often, which is something you _dont_ want for an emergency storage.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
That is one of the coolest things I've ever seen. :) Very very cool... Now if they only had it for OS X. But oh, I could store an encrypted DMG file in that free-space noise! 3-layer dual-platform plausible deniability encryption. Hell yeah. Then I'll ROT-13 it just for good measure.
A Clockwork Radio or a Clockwork Powergenerator for charging all those batteries modern day kit
/mobile phone/flashlight etc.
AND
One of those solar cells that you can buy to trickle charge your car battery while it is sitting on your parcel shelf.
This way, you can keep in contact with whats going on around you and charge your ipod
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
I would include some condoms (about 8), a few packs of cigarettes (even if you don't smoke, they are fantastic for bartering with nicotine addicts, and an emergency contraception kit of a few birth-control pills, like a unit of Plan B (an actual American product sold for post-coital contraception.) If you are a male, this seems absurd. But if you meet women in an emergency situation who do need this (inquire very discretely), they will be your friends and allies to their dying day.
If you can find one, a hand-crank flashlight with super-bright white LED bulbs and a hand-crank radio would be good too. An unusual item that might be useful would be a software program for the USB keychain that has a 10000-word English/Spanish dictionary/phrase book. A PDF file of wild edible plants (with photos and drawings) would be more useful than a cannibal cookbook.
Put an OpenPGP-encrypted zip file onto the drive. Also include a ZIP archiver and PGP decryption program.
If you are considering digital storage for an emergency situation, encrypt it while there is no emergency, but if you have at least 5 minutes warning (which is often the case), copy it un-encrypted. Honestly, if you need to access it, you may find yourself looking hard for a computer where to do it, and discover that you can't install the encryption sw you included in the pen, or have no permission to do it, or that you need to salvage the contents of the pen... really, using encryption for emergency situations is a bad idea. You need to get over it ALIVE, and that should be the main concern. Not getting yourself "a year's worth of food inside a safe but without its key".
You need a bag of bling first, then as many tins of SPAM as you can carry, nice to have a bycycle too.
I'm not saying it's foolish to be prepared, but one has to wonder if spending so much time on something so improbable (yes, even after Katrina) is really worth it. . .
It actually doesn't take very long, and it's interesting besides. The gear, knowledge and ablities are useful to have even if you never leave Manhatten. In fact, I generally carry a certain number of the items on the list when I'm going into Manhatten for a day or three.
If you really want safety, move to a location where there's less chance for natural disaster.
Less chance doesn't mean little chance. I live in upstate NY, one of the safer places all told, and we still manage to have community sized disasters on a reasonably regular basis. The world was not designed for safty. We were only designed so that enough of us live to child bearing age to continue the survival of the species.
In any case preparedness is an axiom of the article.
KFG
...not as far as anyone knows at least. The real question is how the hell do you plan on decrypting it? Computers
might be fried, the program you used my implement the encryption in a strange way, so you need that software too.
Not to mention if the shit really hit the fan, who cares about that kind of data anyway. Make up a new name for yourself
and move on.
Some friends and I have agreed to form a pact where we act as data guardians for each other in the case of an early demise. After seeing what went on after one of our young friend's untimely demise, we decided we wanted to have contingency as to what should happen to our personal data and hardware after we pass on. I am wondering if anyone else has done something similar.
We decided that we'd each get a USB thumb drive and put a password protected RAR file that contains a text document that includes login/passwords to all our personal accounts, lists of online acquaintances who should be informed of our passing and details of our desires for what will be done with personal hardware and data. We've then taped the thumbdrive to the inside of the case of our main desktop computer. We then appointed another person in the group to be our guardian, to then come and retrieve the drive and carry out our wishes.
It's all ad-hoc for now, but when I get around to making a real will, I want to include this as a clause and make it 'official'.
Opinions?
If data integrity is that important, one should consider getting a silver or gold archive disc.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
The New York Times article is just a PR article for the E-HealthKey. The article reminded me of an essay by Paul Graham, The Submarine.
I run Windows XP, totally unpatched. I post my IP address to forums. That way, i'll be sure to get hacked. Now if i ever have to leave my home, i'm sure there are hundreds of copies out there of my data. No need to make another backup eh. Better use that space for toilet paper, as somebody already suggested. Oh, and some beers and peanuts in case you can hitch a ride.
If civilisation as we know it really does break down, none of that information will be important to you anyway. If anybody comes to rescue you, their immediate concerns won't be with proving you are who you say you are. If nobody comes to rescue you, it won't matter. As for storing the data on a solid state flash memory device ..... that's just plain dumb. Can you really be sure that it will work if and when the time comes? Can you even be sure there will be any equipment capable of reading it? On the other hand, if civilisation as we know it doesn't break down, that information -- amounting to a full impersonation kit -- could too easily be used against you.
Given the balance of probabilities, I'd say that storing details of your life on an unreliable solid-state memory device is asking for trouble. Just memorise your name, address and identity number, and remember it's three more pieces of information than many people will be able to remember in an emergency.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Okay, so how about a USB flash drive (personally, I use a SanDisk and - although it's decided it doesn't want to work with my desktop PC at all - it works great with my laptop)...
1) Place all of your files in a single top-level folder.
2) Install GPG or PGP (I prefer GPG) on your system. Generate the strongest possible key you can.
3) Encrypt the folder (and therefore all sub-folders) containing your data.
4) Copy the GPG installer and your public key onto the flash drive, leaving it un-encrypted.
There, now you have the important stuff encrypted, with everything neccesary to unencrypt it right on the same drive. Sure it's not the most secure thing in the world, but c'mon.. what is?
Which reminds me.. my flash drive came with a lanyard to hang your drive around your neck... who does that?!
.gis. cireneg a si siht
a) A regular backup of personal and work related stuff to DVD+RW. Stored in a firesafe.
b) A "personal" kit backup on USB 512Mb flash that I take on travel. This consists of my insurance photos, password safe, finance records, GPG keys, bookmarks, important docs and some software such as firefox, TomsRTBT Linux etc.
c) An "emergency kit" encrypted self-extracting executable uploaded to a website. Just contains a mini version of insurance photos, password safe, finance records etc.
I hope between the three of them that I'm left with *something* if my house burnt to the ground or something else happened. The trouble is keeping them all in sync and it normally requires me to remember to manually copy files from here or there before going away somewhere. I'd probably write a script to automate the syncing if I could be bothered. I've been meaning to play around with Ruby or Python so maybe that would be an opportunity to do all this.
On top of that I've just gotten Subversion running on Win32. This just runs locally so it's not necessarily a backup in itself, but I've started to use it for storing documents and all my programming work. I also back it up to DVD+RW from time to time. I never bothered with source control before now when it was my own stuff, but since trying to use the seriously screwed visual editor in Eclipse, I'm starting to appreciate that a source level undo is actually useful.
While Murphy dictates that if you don't plan for the worst, it will happen, we should all also know that washing your car to make it rain doesn't work. Assume you'll lose either way.
If the information is really that important to you, keep two backups of it, and use different types of media. By that I mean that if one is magnetic, make sure that the other one isn't.
I'd recommend a 2.5" HD in its own enclosure and DVD-RAM. Don't use DVD +/- RW as they just aren't as robust. The rewritable RWs die far too quickly.
Consider what format your backup creates: a simple copy of all of your data files means that recovery is extremely simple but incremental changes and change history are more awkward. That probably isn't an issue for you, as a simple full copy is probably closest to what you want. It also means you are not relying on any specific software, which is very important if you need to perform an out-of-environment recovery.
-- Steve
If there is a disaster of the scale that you are considering, then no-one is going to take even the time that it would take to crack an encrypted .zip file to steal your identity. Better to store it in plain text so that it can be used to identify your bodies, that's just about all that anyone's going to be interested in doing with it.
The USB drive isn't the safest way. ... Consider some sort of obfuscation rather than encryption - you want to be able to extract data in any situation without having to memorize 4kb of gibberish.
An emergency kit of quarter-than-original sized copies of all documents, stamped and signed by an atourney/solicitor are the best to hold up against official double checking. When things get tough, no one's gonna take anything digital for granted. In 5 years from now you'll be able to fake anything you want with a PDA and a cheap off-the-shelf printer.
Do good small fotocopies of the important stuff, fold them well and vacuumwrap them twice. After you've had them checked, verfied and stamped and signed by a solicitor that is.
If you have business information that's imporrtant to you (and you only) and you want to squeeze it onto USB Chip, I recommmend some OSS filsesystem and way of encryption - they're the most likely to be readable a few decades from now. ext2, maybe fat16 or both as Filesystem. But then again, where to keep the crypto-key?
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
That all you really need is your towl
This is what I would recommend for such a task. There are better options but this is the best mainstream option. From the reviews I have read, this drive is very durable. You can even bounce it off walls :)
Can someone tell me what this "Sig" box is for??
Why bother keeping all that stuff?
If the shit hits the fan that severely, you're not going to care about your "identity", and it's really not going to be important. Food, water, and remaining alive will be far greater concerns than your mother's maden name.
Not only that, but it would a good time to fall underneath the radar, as it were. Start over.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
You should take a look at U3. It's a platform that stores and runs software, and looking at their software listings, under Security they seem to have some encryption packages available. It also runs Skype, so I can carry it around and use it on stupid internet cafe's that don't have it installed.
snakes don't live in tundra.
and you know, there's really nothing better than living somewhere there's both internet (sat) and frequent consideration on staying alive properly.
To be honest, USB devices can be pretty flaky and I might not trust them to be sufficiently robust to hold such important docs.
I would probably suggest using something designed for the rigours of mobile use, like an SD card: the bigger the better
The issue of how the data should be stored is a lttle more thorny. An encrypted filsystem might be one option, but I think I'd prefer it to be sitting on something unencrypted and then use file encryption to store the data on that fs. It then means you've got the option of using tools that are more freely available to read the file data in several enviroments: gpg for example. This isn't really a cheerleading post for gpg per se, it's just that because it's availaable cross-platform, you maximise your chances of being able to read the data back when you need it.
It's not you: I'm just this horrifically socially awkward with everybody.
one happily delusional friend like you, upon whom I can rely during this catastrophic fantasy you dream of nightly.
By DAMON DARLIN
What is the first thing you will grab from your home if your house floods, catches on fire or comes tumbling down in an earthquake? Family photos? The pets? The Hummel figurines?
It probably will not be your financial and medical records, the very things you will need to rebuild your life after a disaster. If you are like most people, you have documents stashed in various places throughout your home, perhaps some under lock and key. And with your mind racing as danger hits, you are not going to have the time or wherewithal to figure out which ones you need.
In any case, your financial and medical records would be such a large and unwieldy pile that you would just say forget about it, grab Fluffy and scramble out of there. Indeed, that is probably your reaction any time someone suggests you get your records organized.
But wait. Do not run away yet. New technology is making this tedious task less odious, and surprisingly, it is not that expensive.
All told, you can secure your records in a weekend afternoon. Even better, doing all this has a wonderful side effect: it can put you in better financial shape to survive a disaster because you will end up a lot smarter about how you spend and save money. For instance, one of the first things to do is compile a list of where everything is - account numbers and the locations of important documents. The list will help you or anyone in your family locate things you need for the insurance adjuster or relief worker. (Download a template for this information that you can place right on your computer.)
This is really the "if hit by a bus" list that financial planners have been recommending you compile for your heirs. If you think of the list that way, you will be reminded of your mortality and you will not want to write it. But think of the families displaced by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita or by California wildfires, and the psychological barrier collapses. The list becomes a much easier sell now, said Brent Neiser, a director for the National Endowment for Financial Education. "It forces you to think," he said.
Here is what else you have to do to protect your records and yourself:
RECORD: Once you have made your basic list, save it on a U.S.B. flash drive. A 256-megabyte drive, which you can buy for $20 or even less if you catch a store promotion, gives you enough space for that file and all the other suggestions mentioned below.
Several of the big flash drive makers, like SanDisk and Lexar Media, are now selling more advanced drives that allow you to encrypt the data so others cannot read it without knowing the alphanumeric key that unlocks the code. Some are even shock proofed with heavier rubber and plastic coatings. Those will cost about $10 to $20 more, but are certainly worth it when you consider the sensitivity of the data on them.
It is also a good idea to copy the contents onto additional drives for backup and for other members of the family.
BONUS: When you are listing the credit cards, also note the credit limits so you will know how much you could spend in an emergency. If your credit cards are at their limits now, you are not going to have any cushion to fall back on. So start paying off balances, beginning with the card carrying the highest interest rate.
SCAN: Some important documents are on paper and you will want copies of them with you: tax returns for the last three years (Form 1040 is all you will need in an emergency), a recent pay stub, birth certificates, marriage license, the deed to your home and insurance policy pages that list your coverage. If you do not hav
Keepass is an excellent free, opensource, no-install password/data manager featuring strong crypto. here are a few pointers to USB key-based app collections that I've bookmarked over time.
-- No Sig is a Good Sig
I have been travelling in various countries in the U.S., Europe, and Africa for several years now, and I don't own a computer normally. So, I ssh into my account, where my files are stored (in Texas, I believe) and voila. Anything that's sensitive I encrypt. Now, storing my private key on a CD is an issue, and I should move to a USB drive or something for that maybe. Or not. But cron a job to scp the encrypted data to another box and you're redundant-ized.
The other [and more significant] problem with storing the data AND the private key [which you'd have to do] on that USB device is that it renders the encryption a bit irrelevant. It could be brute-forced if found by someone with minimal know-how and lots of cycles. You're keeping the key under the doormat as it were.
I could understand the argument that you _may not_ have network access, or electricity, etc., but if that's the case and it were beyond a regional scope - government wouldn't be operating very much. You will have to find a computer for the USB drive anyway.
I'm not worried, personally. I've got my $HOME away from home.
Panix and Ductape are great choices.
"When the solution is simple, God is answering." -- Albert Einstein
Why not just store the same stuff you would store on your USB stick on one or more remote servers?
Most ISP's provide free webspace, or just use GMail for the storage
Ofcourse its very important to encrypt it as you would on your USB stick as well.
I just dont see the benefit of storing it on a USB stick and depend on it, because if your USB drive gets corrupt or fails you are totally screwed.
Why not go with old reliable paper? If you need the bug-out-bag, and then get to a palce where you need the document it is entirely possible they will not have the hardware to extract the data you need.
:), water purification, and other essentials.
I made photocopies of important documents, laminated them, and stuck them in the bag along side of a few packages of 'food' - Spam counts right?
Its great that people are starting to think this way. If Katrina & Rita have taught us anything its that we can't rely on anyone else but ourselves in the case of an emergency.
Well, most of the documents which are scanned in and needs to be safed are documents which are not likely to change every month or not even every year, right?
So all the medical data, licenses, diplomas, certificates of any kind can be stored on a CD as well...right?
I still believe that CDs are easier to access on all kind of computers (which computer does NOT have CD-ROM?) and are not that OS-dependent (or driver dependent, whatever). Whereas with flash drives you just might be unlucky enough not to access your data anymore. AND CDs might be just able to survive more than a flash drive (eg. water).
As for encryption...why not using a opensource program which is available for linux AND windows and put it on the CD or flash drive as well? So, encrypt your data with that programm and the only thin YOU need to remember is the password, which might just be choosen easy enough not to be cracked within minutes. You wont put that CD or stick outside a safe anyway in non-emergency days, right?
I must admit that I'd choose a CD-ROM with all my data, encrypt the data, put it in a safe (or even banksafe) and exchange it every...lets say...2 years (with more updated date even). No need to worry if the gouverment or my helpful friend next door might just help me getting back my info from a CD.
just my 2 cents
Take God's Word with you.
Best probably is on paper.
That sounds like a student's emergency kit. Most people don't keep this stuff in a single backpack, but a few standard places: first aid in the car and kitchen, documents at a bank and in a document box, emergency supplies in the kitchen, rescue equipment in the car, ready-to-go luggage for short-term trips. That ensures that you have what you need even in non-emergency situations without exposing you to unnecessary risk or loss (don't keep private documents in the car, for example). In case of an evacuation, you can still grab the two or three things you need from the house quickly enough.
Can anyone suggest a site which offers information about the physical reliability of flash disks?
:-)
I am interested in a review made by someone who is NOT a manufacturer of these things; with these things included:
- how much damage is caused if I high-heeled lady steps on it with the heel
- what happens if you drop it from a certain altitude
- in which way humidity influences it
- what are the side-effects of excessive temperature
etc
A friend of mine went to Egypt. He had a noname USB flash disk with a transparent case. Hell know what happened to it, but he swore it was in the backpack all the time and nobody touched it.. But the flash disk is simply dead, the LED never turns on, and nothing happens when it is plugged in.
So.. maybe the temperature did it, or maybe the fact that it spent so much time in darkness
But come on, a product which stops working after a period of 'doing nothing' is not a good product.
So, does anyone know a place where people can find out how to choose a good usb flash disk, or removable media in general?
The saddest poem
200 is full-proof, without much flavor, but can certainly handle two or more deviations.
"You have liberated me from thought."
In a situation where you are packing your own food and shelter, do you really expect to find a computer with which to read your flash drive? Make paper copies of all those documents, and take both digital and hard copies. Sne trick I learned in boy scouts is to water seal matches etc by encasing them in wax. Drip candle wax into a matchbox full of matches, until it is full to brimming. Let cool and dry. I would expect you could do the same with a USB key, provided it had one of those covers on the business end. Or you could use a ziplock, but they aren't 100% like wax is.
http://www.millennium-ark.net/News_Files/Food/MREs .html
5 46
http://www.uscav.com/productinfo.aspx?productid=7
You enjoy now.
Don't use the crap that comes with the thumbdrives. Install TrueCrypt. I've been using either it or its predecessor, E4M, for years. No problems. You get to choose any of the high grade algorithms you want to use.
I would seriously consider sending the stuff to myself in GMail as well. I already store some important contacts, shopping lists, etc as drafts in my GMail account. They have distributed servers so it should be fairly safe against catastrophe.
There are many types of disasters out there. A flash drive sounds like a good idea until it gets wet or you have an Electro-Magnetic Pulse from a nuke. Nope. Laminate your birth certificate and put it in a little tube.
OOOoooOOO this is my sort of thread... I would pack my hdd's (emp shealded with a frade (sp?) cage, which would prevent the efects of an emp, and I would be able to remove them in 30sec due to the fact that they just slide out of my case (see, the choice of a cool case is important!) then I would take my ipod as a backup, a spare set of cloathing, my palm, food, mob phone, shelter, all in a little trolly that erects into a tent... (will make that I think) Or, as my plan always was, my house is going to be a giant underground nuke proof bunker anyways, so I will just sit there and play games all day untill the net is back up lol... I also agree with the previous statement, I will put in a resignation when my competitors start throwing around warheads lol...
Similiar articles has been on slashdot earlier.
;)
.7z provides good compression and also AES-256 encryption.
You should have a backpack, preferably black as it dont get as easy dirty and allows for stealth, and black looks good on no matter what color of clothes you wear.
There are USB memory sticks made of rubber. I assume they can be handled pretty rough and are water proof.
For compressing/archiving there are many formats,
For encryption you can also use PGP, TrueCrypt, or many other tools. Maybe it is possible to have a Steganographic (StegFS) partition?
In your backpack you should also have a flashlight, there are some that dont require battery, you simply charge them by shaking them.
Matches or a lighter is also good to have.
And a multi-tool knive with knive, screwdriver, scissor, etc.
Glow sticks are also good, they dont produce any heat and can be used under water and many difficult situations.
Also see http://www.ready.gov/index.html
I store everything in 20 MB encrypted sparse images and back it up to StrongSpace (http://www.strongspace.com/) with sftp. (No ftp or http allowed, just sftp and https).
For the filesystem part of the equation, I've just started using FreeOTFE, which is a real-time encrypted filesystem in a file that works on MS Windows and Linux. You get your choice of hash and encryption algorithms.
So far it has worked perfectly.
For secure storage, you could use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography steganography to hide your encrypted data inside of a video clip.
I suppose having papers would be quite handy, but really a simple glass pipe or plastic bong would be more efficient in extending my survival.
I have always valued my digital data. A couple years ago i almost lost all of my pictures, documents, ect. So I decided to make a DVD backup of everything. I went the whole nine yards on these 4 dvd's. They had everything. I stored them in cases and sealed the cases up in a water-tight case. About 6 months ago one of my hard-drives crashed and i needed those backups. SO i dug them up and opened the case. The layers of the dvds had seperated (due to poor manufacturing i suppose) and my data was lost.
Here Here!
Why not just buy your personal info back from the phishers that have already stolen it??
As a victim of the recent hurricane, I can tell you that brackish water can cause some CD-Rs to delaminate or bleed out the recording dye. Even some of my store-bought music CDs had ink from their labels bleeding into the data side.
Corsair has a rubberized water resistent shock-resistent flash drive available. I have one and found that it is quite durable: http://www.corsair.com/
As for encryption, check-out this open source project which offers an excellent encryption solution for Flash drives:
http://www.truecrypt.org/
how often would you need to update anyway? My birth certificate hasn't changed in 31+ years... my guess is you would merely be adding info. Unless of course, you use some type of encrypted archive file that had to be unpacked, stuff added, and rewritten.
...because Plutonians are teh suck
I would get one of the flash drives that fits in my wallet, so I don't need to even go home if I'm in a real hurry.
It was a baaaa-d joke.
I accidently left my 256MB Sandisk Cruzer Mini in the pocket of my jeans as I washed and dryed them (automatic washer and dryer). I found it in the bottom of the dryer, still *really* warm to the touch. When I plugged the Cruzer into my computer, it acted as if the whole incident had never happened. I've used it every day since then and never had an issue. It gets my vote for 'sturdy drive'.
-gary
Forget all that official Bureaucracy stuff.
If things are so bad that THEY cannot tell you what it is, you dont need it!
What you really need would be usefull reference texts, Grays Anatomy, How things work, 101 uses for a dead cat, 1001 chemical reactions from household waste. All hardcopy; and when I say hardcopy I don't mean paper, or even clay tablets I mean really hard copies like granite slabs, preferable formed into a shelter deep underground.
...it's for attracting animals to kill.
What is the honey for ? You can't leave us ignorant city folk wondering any longer. It's just not fair!
Government requires too darn much record-keeping these days. If the pioneers were required to retain as much paper as we do for taxes and the like, the US would still be stuck on the east side of the Mississippi River. Can't we just cut through the regulation burden and get rid of all that crap in our lives? If I want to escape from a natural or man-made disaster with the things that are necessary/important to me, I sure as heck hope I'd be grabbing kids, pets, food/clothes/gun (depending if it's an apocalypse), and a few treasured keepsakes rather than tax returns, licenses, and paperwork. Anyone else yearning for a more libertarian society or is it just me?
That said, the article did have make some good points. A "bug out" bag is a wise idea (as is a bomb shelter - y'all have one of them too, right?). Thank goodness for technology, so that all the important "crap" can be reduced to a USB stick. I deal with information so much better if I don't have to mess with the physicality of the (paper) records. (Yes, my natural filing system is heaps and stacks. Thank God for my wife or I wouldn't be able to find my desk.) I think the advice about medical records was the most useful. Now that's something I'd want if I had to pick up and move fast.
Constitutionally Correct
What the hell kind of fatalistic bullshit is this? You plan in case of emergencies, not to have it act as some sort of talisman to ward it off! My goodness, some people just can't deal with things that are beyond their direct control, can they?
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Be sure to turn that iPod up real loud while looting. We wouldn't want to overburden our judicial system in a time of crisis with looters who heard the warning shot.
...how helpful that knife, spoon, and even maybe the chopsticks will be when they confiscate them.
i am so very tired....
... Yr car won't start, either, thanks to the ignition system (and prob all the ICs and other solid-state tomfoolery under the hood these days, just now thought of that).
It'd be just like New Orleans, a bunch of stranded people, only minus the water and w/ tons of radioactivity. Wheeeeee!!!
Yeah, pretty much just Sharpie the SSN on the forearm and wait for the inevitable.
Periodically, I think about how I can protect my 'vital' data (code and digital photographs, mostly) against loss. Options include local backups (a few feet away), backups at my girlfriend's house (a few blocks away), backups at my job (several miles away), backups at a relative's house (hundreds of miles away), or backups at my parents' house (thousands of miles away). This thought experiment has led me to the conclusion that there are some disasters that are not worth preparing against. If anything simultaneously takes out my data and the backup copies in my office a few miles distant, losing my holiday snaps and my bank statements may not be my biggest problem.
Getting back to the original poster's question, the danger is that any device you carry on you such as a Flash drive is liable to get lost, stolen or broken. As for Flash drives that support encryption, how many of those also require special driver software on the target computer to give access to the encrypted data? It would be embarassing to stumble out of the disaster zone still clutching your 'life drive' and discover that you really should have thought to bring the installer CD currently lying somewhere under eight feet of water/radioactive fallout/zombies/radioactive zombies. But maybe you could copy the installer onto the unencrypted part of the drive.
A possible alternative (or additional measure) is to put your data on a foreign website (or, for defence in depth, several, all in different countries). Naturally, you'll want to encrypt it securely and upload/download only over secure links. But if the Internet stays up, then you have a chance of being able to access your data even after the asteroid hits your home city and you've been stripped of everything you're carrying by the feral teenage swamp mutants.
Again, if you use encryption you're hostage to the availability of the decryption software, so you may start thinking about building your own webapp that can decrypt your data on the fly and serve it to you over HTTPS. But that would preclude using any of the free hosting accounts available, so your quest for perfect security and redundancy could lead you to fork out for expensive virtual hosting. Maybe what we need instead is some kind of 'mixmaster' application that would accept a key and some data, and stripe the data across a few thousand locations (call it a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Domains), encrypted and inter-mingled with other people's data in such a way that nothing intelligible would be recoverable without the key. Redundancy would be built in from the ground up such that even if half the planet goes offline, your data could still be retrieved from the surviving hosts.
Even if something like this doesn't already exist, it shouldn't be hard to build: all the technologies already exist in one form or another (PGP, BitTorrent, mixmasters, PAR/RAR etc etc). All it needs is a team of dedicated geeks, plus a healthy dose of paranoia, and you and your data can step smiling and unscathed into the bright nuclear dawn of the New Age (watch out for the zombies, though).
put flash drive in a cigar tube, put latex baloon over tube, rubberband balloon to tube below seam.
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
When I was last on a trip outside the US, I took digital photos of all my family's passports and kept them in the camera. I figured if we lost the passports, the images in the camera would help. It came in handy when I needed info off the passports on the plane. I was able to read it on the camera's display without getting the passport out of the overhead compartment.
You've got to bring a towel -- amateurs never have their towel.
Also a fry pan and an axe. You need something to cook in and you can fix anything with an axe. Also, I'd bring my sleeping bag and tent -- they are small and I have lived out of them for years at a time.
And you might want to have some fishing gear and some wire to snare rabbits. Then you'd be able to survive indefinitely.
But definitely bring a towel.
TC is excellent, i use it at home. about being windows only: the next version will be linux and 64bit compaitable too. hoorah! :)
it is easy enough to make a container file the right size for your USB drive, and leave the TC installer in the enuncrypted portion of the drive for use on PC's without TC installed and without internet access to remedy this deficiency.
take it easy
Dimble
I understand the desire to want a copy of your personal records, but why keep it with you? Let's say you are out to dinner one night, and your house, with your survival gear and USB backup, all burn up. You'll want those records for the insurance process.
Every year I photograph any major purchases, scan the receipts, scan any other new important documents, and burn them all to 2 CDs. One I keep in my fire safe, the other goes in my parent's fire safe, in another state, out away from a big city. If something ever happens here, I can worry about my life, and not my records, as I know they'll have a copy.
The information that they recommended you store is important, but not the most important. You also need to:
n cy_checklist.html
a l_kit.html
1) Create an emergency checklist (do it today). A good example of what to include can be found here; http://www.geocities.com/survival_planning/emerge
2) Put together a couple of emergency survival kits. Again, some of the items to include can be found here; http://www.geocities.com/survival_planning/surviv
3) Read and learn as much as you can about survival. Knowledge is key and you can buy books like the SAS survival guides or one of many Survival CDs like the one found here; http://www.militaryebooks.com/survival.php
Good luck and Semper Fi!
There are interesting security issues with full-disk encryption, but it depends on your attack model. If your attack model is simply that the encrypted disk falls into the hands of the bad guys who try to get the data from it, the problem is easy. If the model is that they have access to the disk inbetween times that you're using it, that's when things get interesting.
Since in this instance the plausible attacks by-and-large fall into the former category, I don't see a difficulty here, am I wrong?
I'm not aware of any interesting current work on full-disk encryption apart from Rogaway et al's interesting large-tweaked-blockcipher mode CMC - if you know any please enlighten me, thanks!
Xenu loves you!
if "the worst" happens what in the hell makes you think you'll have nice USB-capable computers with which to read the stupid pen drive? is this some kind of joke? sure, have it on USB if you want, however I would go with inscribed metal for important data -- like, oh, I don't know... dog tags.
that's it. keep your USB pen drives. I'll keep my dog tags. lot of good either will really do us if "the worst" happens to NYC.
and the "swim for it" addendum? come on.
MORTAR COMBAT!
Face it, buddy. If you can't handle one girl now, how do you expect to handle a bevy of them?
Although it reminds me of the old joke about the businessman, the artist, and the programmer discussing the benefits of wives and mistresses.
The businessman says, "It's better to have a wife. It's a more stable arrangement and more sensible legally speaking."
The artist says, "Ah, but a mistress is so much more exciting and passionate."
The programmer says, "I say a man should have a wife and a mistress. The wife will think you're with the mistress. The mistress will think you're with the wife. And you can actually get some work done!"
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
Nuclear blast areas: (20 megatons at 17,500 ft airburst)
8.5 miles - vaporized.
35 miles - 15% dead, 50% injured. Cite
??? miles - EMP so strong that internal components of chips melt. Cite
Hmm. Paper seems safer, easier to deal with without computers. And if I live, so does the data. Anyway, it's not likely someone would get a 20 megaton bomb. More likely 10 Kt to 1 Mt. Revise that for "Best be more than 50 miles away." Make that 150 miles for a 20 megaton.
Can I go live on a planet where we don't have this madness?
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
Take the drive, compress your files in an archive to keep them smaller, then encrypt the file with a program. Include on that drive the program that you used to encrypt the file, and the compression program used to compress the file. Make sure the drive is formatted with a cross platform FS as well. For added reliability include other platform versions of the encryption and compression programs.
Waterproofing the flash drive is pretty easy, put it a small sealed container the smaller the better. If you're really paranoid about losing it in water, put the flash drive in a very small container filled with mineral oil or some other inert liquid, seal the container. If your drive goes to any depth, the use of a liquid will prevent water from getting in the container and destroying the drive.
I just might decice to be someone else.
The in-laws gave a CD of all their vital information to my sister-in-law before leaving on a two-week trip to Europe. Wouldn't you know it, a little storm named Katrina blew in while they were away. The sister-in-law remembered to grab the CD as her family fled inland. Now, if they had only remembered to put their MSN password on the CD so that they could get to their email.
A towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have. Partly it has great practical value - you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you - daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have "lost". What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.
When the fragile lattice of society's infrastructure collapses, the last thing you are going to want to rely on is being able to find a working PC with USB adapter. At that point it's back to basics because the next disaster is going to be bigger and meaner than anything we've seen. You can rely on paper. Just...laminate it.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
I have heard that you can put some documents in the freezer, as it will be mostly waterproof when the FD floods your house and stands a decent chance at being fireproof as well.
We bought a little fireproof waterproof safe for like $50.
I think the topic of this post was mostly for big chemical, bio, or nucular attack on NYC or DC. What would you take? How prepared would you be to never come back to your house?
BTW, Foxfire books are awesome if you don't have the series already. Great stuff with good detail on everything from building a log cabin to making moonshine to making a violin.
I'll definitely second that. While a quality leatherman type tool is extremely valuable, even a quality swiss army knife pays off quickly. I have a nice quality swiss army knife with a large, strong, locking blade that I've used nearly daily for over ten years. It is showing no signs of throwing in the towel, and comes in handy constantly (I have a philips screwdriver, not a corkscrew). It never leaves my side.
The gun is a good idea. If you plan to become proficient, a .22 is a great survival gun because it is small, lightweight, the ammo is small and lightweight, and it is cheap (the gun itself, the ammo and the cost of practicing).
I have to strongly recommend against eating mushrooms you've identified using a field guide. Although there a a few simple rules to help you avoid mushrooms that are certainly poisonous, being certain that they are not poisonous is much more difficult. I've been out mushroom hunting with mycologists before, and even they are a bit wary of eating things that they are not 100% sure of. For what my word is worth, I'd recommend sticking to plants and animals. They are much easier to positively identify.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
Easier said than done! Where does one find gold discs nowadays? The only two companies I know of that has produced them in the past, Kodak and Mitsui, have long since stopped producing them. The overwhelming majority of consumers cares way more about price than data integrity and longevity, so the market trend has been to produce cheaper and cheaper discs at the expense of data integrity. The few of us that care about data integrity and longevity are pretty much SOL.
If NYC has such a large problem that everything falls down then the rest of the US is probably financially screwed anyway. So, why bother keeping your identity? You'll probaby just have bad credit anyway.. after all, everything that you had is gone including your job so you can't pay your bills.. Sounds like at that point in time you're better off moving to Kansas and starting a new life... heck, maybe find out how all those illegal aliens get ssn#'s and really start a new life..
Obama = Socialism.
The list of things you are concerned about puzzles me.
What exactly are you going to do with credit card numbers after a disaster? Do you plan on charging food with a number? Who exactly is going to give you goods with just a #? If you have time to get a backpack, then you should have time to get your wallet.
I'm not sure what the value of a marrige license is either after such a disaster. Do you think you will have to prove to someone that you are married?
What value will a scan of your social security card be? Birth certificate?
Like others have said, if you are leaving "never to return to NYC" with 2 minutes warning, documents would be the last concern you should have. Compact calorie/nutrient rich food, water, appropaite clothing, and other survival supplies should be what you take.
I saw someone talking about an English/Spanish program on that USB drive. How exactly are you going to use in it your travels? A small portable book would be more useful.
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
This whole discussion seems kind of silly to me.
Anyone who has implemented backup strategies knows that if its not automated it will be out of date. Sure you could take some static data, but you could print that out on paper (encrypted if need be).
One EMP is going to take out a million nerds' data sticks in a flash while grandma with her ancient address book will be intact.
memories where backed up like an family album photo
of the angle that you saw the events,
nice, but creepy...
that would be a pretty profitable bussiness for porn industry.
i have found, you can find,happiness in slavery!
the New York Times has an article about what to take when you have to leave home in a big hurry
Step One: Move away from the coast now.
For those U.S. residents now fretting over the recent hurricanes, consider this. All those states in the middle don't get hurricanes. They don't get big earthquakes. They don't get big floods (except, gasp, along the big rivers). They get the occassional tornado (which are highly localized) and the occassional blizard (which you can wait out).
If you must live in a big city, move to Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Indianapolis, Columbus, Denver, Charlotte, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Birmingham, Atlanta, Milwaukee, Nashville, Vegas, etc.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
When any kind of big disaster (i.e. citywide) hits a major concentrated metropolitan area, all people there are basically screwed, so I wouldn't worry so much about protecting your digital info/software assets. You're gonna have much bigger problems with obtaining and retaining survival basics such as food, water, medicines, shelter, etc.
Here's a favorite quote of mine that I made up: In the "big city" you can get anything you want... except out."
Wouldn't it be faster to just fill out a phishing request?
Verizon: Latin for "poor rural service".
Put the data in several secure areas and on the USB encrypted.
Print out your keys using the Xerox http://www.parc.com/solutions/dataglyphs/
Its proprietary but damn simple to print.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
gg: search google
ggl: search google and hit "i'm feeling lucky"
fm: search freshmeat
imdb: search imdb
he, he, he
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
web mail services in Brasil (some Portuguese reading may be required):
BOL
Yahoo!
IG
Oi
in France (some French required):
NetCourrier
HTH.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
1. VERY vulnerable to an electromagnetic pulse
2. VERY vulnerable to static
3. VERY vulnerable to corrosion
Acid free paper would survive much better.
http://www.textfiles.com/survival/
http://zombiesquad.theedge.net/phpbb2/
except with zombies in mind.
Carve your message in fifty mile high letters across the surface of the moon!
:-)
:-)
You're now perfectly safe from fire *and* water damage (because there's no water or oxygen on the moon), plus the data can be recovered with a simple telescope!
Now, that's what I call offsite storage, baby!
P.S. Only do this if you can afford it. If you have to ask, you can't afford it.
A company named Kanguru makes FIPS-140 compliant USB drives... they work great and can be AES-256 bit encrypted, as well. Their website is kanguru.com
www.TakeArms.com
the hex to my dog's ID chip.
my wife would say the same thing.
-mj
You just need to look in the right place. Check a digital photography (or nowadays, simply photography) store, they always have long-term archival CDs, usually a wide variety of them.
Random and weird software I've written.
and your upbraiding him? You fucking moron. You motherfucking moron.
People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.
My wife washed the 512M Lexar jump drive I gave her with the rest of our laundry. It didn't make it into the dryer. I left it on the desk for about 10 days to dry out and it worked fine. That's not a scientific endorsement of the item, but an anecdotal observation.
In any armeggadon situation, a USB drive will be no use at all. However, it's worth thinking about what you do when faced with more mundane risks - house burns down, bag stolen etc.
A colleague had his bag stolen whilst travelling abroad, and had to jump through quite a number of hoops to get all his documents replaced (Credit cards are pretty easy. Passport was OK, US visa was a complete pain in the arse.) Since then, I have taken to carrying a USB drive with copies of all my various bits of documentation when I travel, so it's easier to get replacements if stuff gets nicked.
The only other thing you really need to guard against the house burns down scenario is an offsite backup of all your photos and other irreplacable things.
Gives new meaning to the phrase "tender bits". Tattoo where? Hmmmm.
Pros:
- You have a great deal more control over your encryption
- it will work damn near everywhere.
- You won't need admin rights to the computer your working on because you won't be installing software
- No data would be saved to the HD of the computer you're working on, so you won't have to worry about information leakage from that vector
You can even have a knoppix CD in case the computer you're at just can't boot from USB.Cons:
- The linux stuff on the disk is going to limit (somewhat) your available space on the stick
- You don't want to over-use that thing, because they do have a limited number of write cycles they can go through before they start to crap out (i.e. do NOT use a journaled FS!!!)
- While you'll at least have all your ID information, what's to say you're not just a very sophisticated con artist? Just because you have a scan of your ID cards, doesn't mean that you didn't have access to GIMP or Photoshop beforehand ^_~
Someone else suggested storing it on gmail, I'd say that's a good idea to do in conjunction with this. Having that USB stick handy can be good because if all hell breaks loose, chances are you're not going to have good internet access in that area. If you have that USB stick and somehow have access to a computer and power, then you've got some options.Honestly, something else to consider putting on that stick (if you have the space), pictures. Get your ID info on there, but for God's sake don't forge to get some pictures on there. Having lost a picture album in a move, I have a slightly better idea of how important those really are now.
Regards,
Petyr Rahl
I like this one better- Dr. Strangelove's Survival kit contents: one forty-five caliber automatic; two boxes of ammunition; four days' concentrated emergency rations; one drug issue containing antibiotics, morphine, vitamin pills, pep pills, sleeping pills, tranquilizer pills; one miniature combination Russian phrase book and Bible; one hundred dollars in rubles; one hundred dollars in gold; nine packs of chewing gum; one issue of prophylactics; three lipsticks; three pair of nylon stockings.
(AC) Those aren't kioslaves, they are web shortcuts.
I stand corrected.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
This is always my big worry with encrypted storage. I keep a few encfs encrypted volumes around with important stuff, and I'm always worried when I update a kernel, or update the software (Granted, maybe I shouldn't do that), and will I ever get my data back out. What happens, then, if I have to move the volumes to another machine and try to access them? Will they work with THEIR kernel and encfs? What about a standalone implementation of the algorithm? Will that work one implementation to the next? In theory they should for standard algorithms, but who really knows?
g /printing/converting/encrypting/decrypting software? Could have a seperate partition that can be mounted as a drive on any (Read: A windows system. Sometimes in an emergency you have to use what you have) with copies of the data protected redundantly in multiple ways? An encfs volume, a loopback encrypted volume, straight AES/3DES/Foo, rar with parity. The weakest one lowers the overall security of your data, but maybe one of them will work to get your stuff back on an arbitrary system with unknown configuration. You'll still need your keys and passphrases, a computer, USB port, and the device needs to be functional, but it might improve the odds a bit.
How about combining elements of your List of Potential Problems? A USB drive bootable to a small linux distro with a variety of data storage/viewing/creating/manipulating/transmittin
It's like keeping all your eggs in one basket, but the basket is divided into a number of little baskets.
"These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based on the order in which I joined" --Homer re:
In many jurisdictions, only the original or a certified copy of the original document is legally admissible. A scanned image of a birth certificate is not going to cut it, you need the real thing (for the same reason that a photocopy wouldn't cut it).
PP
like a unit of Plan B (an actual American product sold for post-coital contraception.) If you are a male, this seems absurd. But if you meet women in an emergency situation who do need this (inquire very discretely), they will be your friends and allies to their dying day.
Y'know, that's a really damn good idea. I'll make a note of that.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I give up. What's the point of the pennywhistle? TIA.
Not a joke, that's one of the most brilliant ideas I've ever heard.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Actually, I've heard that the ultimate fiber is Dog Hair.
There is a lady (has a website somewhere) who will make you a sweater from your own dog if you send her the hair.
It seems that dog hair is a better insulator when it is cold than wool or down and insulates even when wet (note Labradors that swim in frozen lakes). Also, the structure of the hair fiber changes when it gets warm and it breathes better than cotton. If it didn't, all those golden retrievers would have heat stroke.
Now which dog -- I don't know. I'm sure short-haired Dachshund is impractical -- I'm guessing that Saint Bernard's might be close to ideal. You'll have to have it washed a lot to not have that doggy smell.
So man's best friend has man's best sweater. Of course, this would be very expensive, but if you wanted the BEST all weather clothing, look no further than Dog Hair.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
But seriously, who'd want to go camping without an ax, frypan, tent, sleeping bag or towel???
My camping philosophy is more Admundsen than Scott -- you do it right and you can go to Antarctica in style or you can be a survival dork and get there last and die miserably.
Why focus on being a survivalist when you can set your horizon a bit higher? Besides, I am an overachiever.
When I made the decision to get a CS degree, I figured the only way I could afford to do so was to not pay rent... so I camped for three and a half years. I didn't tell most of my class mates and they were none the wiser. If I did tell them they thought I was joking since I made a point of always wearing clean clothes and shaving regularly (unlike my classmates). I didn't bring honey, I had beehives. I had a garden and a woodstove.
It was nice, but I like living in a house now. However, it's good to know that if the house was destroyed I wouldn't have trouble living well because living well is an intangible that is a part of one's self not an inventory gleaned from some lifestyle magazine.
---
When life gives you lemons, make organic lemon extract...
This is the best idea. What happens in disasters most offen is the trauma and chaos makes you forget even common everyday things. Forget encryption keys. A knock on the head with falling debris can also do wonders to your memory. Inconspicous laminated paper is the best there can be. We have paper from BC. still intact.
Ahh, the Genie in the Dongle myth
*Any* catastrophic scenario (ie. Nature, Bio, Nuclear, etc...) overwhelms to wit: Katrina. Be ready to grab&go on 20min. notice - anywhere, anytime. Its a mindset, grok that.
Break your gear down. Essentials==24 hours, Survival==6da basically, that's all you can carry (30#). The Essentials is your GO bag which you grab 1st and easiest to keep close to you. Survival is your 2nd takeaway, its heavier and bigger. Don't build up a pig to throw around. Think backpacking Lite. If you get the chance, take your Survival bag, but know you're good-to-go with the EssentialsBag.
You are not packing for a trip. What you wear, you'll live-in for the first week or two. Take what will make the inconvenience tolerable. Like a drop of liquid soap does wonders once a day for underwear. Include food for yourself the first 24hr. Your choice: sugar or dehydrated food. Salt. Tools: leatherman-type, matches, 1st Aid, ductape, Rx, OTC remedies (aspirin, ibuprofin, sunscreen, blister patch,etc...) Clothing: Gloves- leather+latex, socks-in-baggie, 2nd pr. glasses, hat, jacket. Cash and Passport.
SurvivalBAG include: Shelter: Tent, sleeping bag, stove, fuel, water (dromedary bags), foodstuffs, inclimate clothing, 2nd shoes, games. Build independence....
Dry-run your EssentialsBag. Take a 5 day vacation. Throw out what you didn't use, add what you need.
The larger question in my mind is what do the public agencies / corporations do for data backup? Can the folks born in New Orleans still get copies of their birth certificates? Can they get new credit cards issued? It seems to me that while the individualist approach may be comforting to individuals, it may also be unnecessary if these institutions are trustworthy (a very big "if", I know, but this is the question I'm asking).
I'm sure I don't have the resources that government and/or industry have to do secure backups, maintain fireproof server rooms, distaster recovery, etc.
Is the original question the wrong question to be asking?
Flame away...
Keep this in mind: Fireproof files are designed to protect paper. All they have to do is keep it below the point where paper combusts or degrades, and they've done their job. Of course, your CDs, backup tapes, and plastic-encased flash devices have long since become a puddle at the bottom of the box.
A "media safe" uses evaporative elements in the housing, such as water-impregnated foam, to resist temperature rise past a certain point for a certain amount of time. They must be replaced after a single fire, because the thermal parts are exhausted. Media safes are many times the cost of regular fire safes.
Geographically distributed backups, or those kept on your person, are a much better idea. Do you have a trusted friend who lives more than 500 miles away?
Where does one find Gold discs these days? Just search the web for "Gold archival CD-R" and you'll find plenty of sources.
By your own reasoning it should be safe for you to post your credit card number on /.
Why not?
Here it is: 4901 1791 0036 7030
Now what?
A few weeks back, I lost my thumbdrive. Last I remember seeing it was in my pocket, and I couldn't find it any obvious place it would've fallen out.
I finally found it in the dryer. Turns out it went through one load in the washing machine and two loads in the dryer. Plugged it into my laptop and everything was fine.
Think worstcase scenario. A small nuclear explosion releases significant microwave radiation. Nt only that, but some electronic detection gear does not do good things to flash RAM. I would suggest a CD-ROM backup at some reasonable interval.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
I friend of mine used an Otterbox when we went packing a few years ago to store his camera and flash cards (Canon S100 I believe). He didn't abuse it by any means, but it went canoeing, hiking, rock climbing, and sailing over 3 weeks and it stayed in perfect condition. They aren't too expensive, and if you want to be sure you documents, digital or not, are safe, it can't hurt to spend a few dollars.
It's not elegant but it WILL work.
What you need:
an old laptop with power supply.
a CF to IDE adaptor, along with a IDE to notebook adaptor.
win98/ME disc
flash drive
Vacuum sealer
What you do is you take that laptop, and using the CF card, and adaptors, install the CF card into the laptop in place of the hard drive...this will ensure a maximum shock resiliency. MAKE SURE TO INSTALL YOUR ENCRYPTION SUITE!
Once that is done, take the laptop, and power supply, and put it into a bag and use the vacuum sealer to render it waterproof. Do not open this until the apocalypse, or 5 years, just to verify it's still funcitonal.
Next, take your flash drive, and use it for your backups as normal.
Keep the vacuum sealer with appropriate sized bag ready. When the time comes, vaccum that puppy, and shove it in the napsack you will put the laptop into, and get your butt outta dodge!
I actually have done this myself, since I live in a hurricane prone area...I'm ready for the worst.
101 uses for a dead cat? http://images-eu.amazon.com/images/P/0517545160.01 .LZZZZZZZ.gif How is that going to help when things go pear shaped?
To err is human. To forgive is not company policy.
Assume that there could be an EMP type attack, your memory could get scrubbed. Print out all the critical stuff on A5 card and laminate it. You will wind up with a slim paperback with all your critical data on it. Keep that hidden by your knapsack (its too valuable to the ID thieves).
Remember also to provide some other way to get the passwords if it's pw-locked. Under a stressful situation, what are the odds that you or your family will remember it?
Frankly all these discussions involving nuke strikes miss an important point - if there is a nuke strike we're going to have other personal and societal problems so severe that not having your paperwork is probably going to be completely moot.
... assuming of course that we even survived the thing in the first place...
Considering how many security holes and other compromises we are subject to these days, (even with good anti-virus, firewalls, etc) it's probably better to keep that information on some offline storage media. That way, when you get hacked, there is less chance someone will capture all your 'life documents' in one easy fell swoop.
I have been compiling just-in-case info too, but I keep it on CD, flash or an external-usb-harddrive that is only connected to my PC when I'm working on those files.
I think some people are confusing Relocation vs Apocalypse. They really require seperate planning. If there is a minor or medium level catastrophe *which is NOT going to bring technology and civilization in your country to a screeching halt* (like a hurricane or earthquake), then yes, it is a great idea to utilize something like a USB drive to store all your vital info and beaurocratic crap like IRS returns, bank account info, etc. So, if you have to high-tail and possibly start over somewhere else, it will be fairly seamless.
I would also recommend in this scenario to store vital info in some tar-zip file either on an online account (even something as simple as an email attachment sent to your gmail account) or purchase a domain and domain hosting and have your own private web area to store files. Then you don't have to remember to grab the USB drive going out the door (which you might).
If there is an Apocalyptic event *which will bring your region/country/world to it's knees for a long time* (ie nuke/chem/bio terrorist attack, complete infrastructure breakdown), your USB drive backup or online backup or whatever is useless and your main concern should be survival. The best way to prepare for this is probably learning how to live off the land and maybe stocking up but that won't last you very long. I'd recommend moving out of any big cities now because when the shit hits the fan, the cities will be chaos (ala New Orleans). Move somewhere where there is plentiful resources and not a lot of people.
Seems to me like quantum chemists are just about the last people we'd need after the fall of civilization. Hell, at least computer scientists can get to work on the next Stonehenge. Of course if recovery from the fall involves massive population rebuilding, the pretty package can be her contribution to the cause.
I own a Lexar Jump Drive secure in both 256 and 1GB sizes and these are almost 2 different products. The 256MB model has a very robust plastic resin case. The 1GB has a cheaper plastic and the plastic is painted. This means after 6 months on my keychain it is a featureless plastic blob with no identifying marks and faint traces of paint. The 256MB model had an easier to use and more robust encryption program. The way it works is you execute a program that comes on the keychain (mac or PC) and it installs an easy to use, non TSR program to allow you to partition a secure partition in whatever size you want, and to access the secure partition after insertion. It is a single .exe that is run and doesn't require you to install any drivers or programs that have to run all the time. You run it, you finish, you close it. Easy.
The 1GB model has a completely different security program that requires installation and it keeps a driver running in the background at all times. Not convenient. I also gave up trying to use the software as it was so bug ridden it proved completly unuseable. It won't work through a hub for one thing, and for another I got a different error on every computer I tried to use the software on. Using it without encryption though it works fine.
The 256 is a great deal, works great, and I couldn't ask for anything more from a thumb drive. I carry all my credit card info, phone numbers, and passwords on it in a locked partition. The best part is, that since it's a hardware encryption, you can't crack it without disassembling and modifying the hardware.