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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"?
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
Tatoo yourself in reeealy reealy little 1's and 0's. Tatoo your wife with the decryption key.
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.
Upload it to the internet and let the world mirror it.
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.
Just watch out for people trying to "brute force" your wife.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
You realise that you are posting on slashdot? "OK take it! Just don't puncture blow up betty!"
Bush summoned up a hurricane! Too bad he can't run again or he'd have my vote for sure.
I guess your data is amazingly clean then.
Mauve? You do realise this means changing the bulb
Waiting for an amusing sig.
Fijifilm makes USB flash drives?
My sig beat up your sig.
Ah. Scientologists.
No, but Fujifilm does.
how would you protect the drive itself in case you did have to "swim for it"?
Which you should put in something commonly refered to as a "Baggie."
KFG
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
Fortunatly for me I have a good friend in Nigeria who is willing to take copies of all my important documents and store them in a safe place as part of an ongoing business relationship him and I share.
"...and animal husbandry"
Oh come ON now! Society is having a tough enough time with gay marriage to even go there!
"Fortunatly for me I have a good friend in Nigeria who is willing to take copies of all my important documents and store them in a safe place as part of an ongoing business relationship him and I share."
FREND- I AM AWIATING ON NYOUR MOST EXPIDICSOUS REPLY TO MY LATEST LETTER. I NEED TO COMMUNICATE WITH YOU BY TELEFON AS SOON AS HUMANELY POSSIBLE. DO NOT DISAPOINT ME.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Have fun carrying your filing cabinet around.
I leave an encrypted backup DVD with my parents twice a year when I visit, making this whole issue moot.
Little did you know that your mother has been using those DVDs as drink coasters at coctail parties for years.
Better luck next time sucker.
Nice. I just repeated this comment to some workmates but got a bunch of sheepish looks.
--- Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity
Ewe get the feeling these pun cascades are getting out of hand? I'm hoofing it; cud knows, it's woolly enough in here without wondering wether or not anyone here is on the lamb.
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."
Dude, I put in about 300 meters of cat5 in a newly renovated/remodeled office suite. There's lots of Cat-5 in DC.
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups. -- 0 1 My two bits
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?
"That's what I get when I try to type with one hand, eat with the other"
Ri-i-ight. "eat".
Only one problem here. There is no spoon.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
a cat 5 in DC? no effing way - the water doesnt get warm enough that far up the coast.
Yet.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Sorry. All by baggies will be employed to keep my stash dry,
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Thou shallt not Flush your Flash...
And don't forget the bananas. We'll need those when the radiation turns us all into monkeys.
That's all good and well, but without a Smith and Wesson one of your fellow disaster victims is going to become the proud new owner of:
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.
Why not just buy your personal info back from the phishers that have already stolen it??
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.
Hey, I hear some guys can do that. There was even a rumor flying around (sheesh, almost ten years ago!) that Marilyn Manson had one of his ribs removed for that very reason!
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
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.
you don't get it. He did it alone
And to be extra sure, stick the baggie in a tub of vaseline. Not only does it perfectly waterproof it (vaseline is hydrophobic, so it can't be penetrated by water), it's also prepped in case you need to hide it quickly.
. . .it's also prepped in case you need to hide it quickly.
Oh, hey. That's one I hadn't thought of. Go figure.
KFG
"Jesus Christ, dude!!"
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.
DNA samples from you and all family members (hair samples in tiny individually labeled plastic bags would be good)