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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"?
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.
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.
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
I doubt that. There isn't enough bandwidth on the USB port to write the ammount of data that would kill the flash memory. It's more likely to be mechanical failure of components.
Meant partly in jest to be sure, but not a bad idea overall. Gmail provides a hell of a lot of (presumably) RAIDed to hell and back storage. That said, it's also probably stored somewhere in San Fransisco... so if you live there, that probably isn't your best bet.
If you live in New York though, it's a good alternitive. The only kind of problems that I can think of that would make you need to flee New York and make data stored in San Fransisco irretreivable are the sort of problems after which you don't need your identity anyway.
Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.
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.
Actually that is not that bad of an idea.
Encrypt it and send it to your gmail account, your Yahoo briefcase, and maybe your hotmail account. Not to mention storing it on your USB drive.
BTW your best bet for security for your USB drive is physical security. If you are really worried about someone taking it carry a spare full of fake data.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Add in diplomas, as many different PDF resumes as jobs you might be interested in, 1 PDF CV each, baptismal certificates... ... working copies of MS Word and MS Excel, a simple text editor, Acrobat Reader, viruses, worms, trojan horses, Windows .DLL files, and ...
all of which leads me to the following question.
Why not just upload encrypted versions of this info to your YAHOO mail, and have it there in a folder "personal stuff", as attachments? That way, you don't depend on just the USB drive? Yeah, the USB would also be good for redundancy, but the easiest access is probably by YAHOO mail, and it automatically scans for malware as it goes.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
I don't know where you people get these wacky ideas. EMP is a myth, propagated by science fiction and kept alive by idiots like yourself.
The theoretical electromagnetic pulse effect would hypothetically be created by a multimegaton nuclear explosion in suborbital space in which a massive burst of hard radiation interacts with the upper atmosphere. This is pure science fiction.
In real life, the electrical-magnetic coupling effect of a hard radiation burst from a nuclear explosion is all absorbed by the stuff -- buildings, people, air --within the actual blast radius itself. Meaning that if your computer is close enough to a nuclear detonation to be harmed by a voltage spike from an electrical-magnetic couple effect, you will be very disappointed for however many milliseconds it takes for your computer to be reduced to atoms by the blast.
But where will you store your private key? Another flash card? Would you put them both into one wallet?
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
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
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
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.
Don't forget a recent copy of your prescription.
ou don't need any kind of encryption scheme at all. Take the social security card out of your wallet and look at it. It isn't encrypted, is it?
How about we reverse this and wonder why our credit cards and other valuable information AREN'T more secure, so that life wouldn't suck so bad when you lose your wallet/purse. Thankfully, some companies are starting to wise up, but many things are still way too vulnerable.
For most of these documents, I don't think a scanned copy is going to do jack shit for you.
Scenario A: The world is totally fucked -- having a scan of your 8 year old DL and passport, plus three litres of pure water, can trade for a pack of smokes.
Scenario B: The world's fine, but your house is destroyed -- w00t. You have a scanned copy of your passport. Try to use that anywhere. Try to use a scanned copy of your birth certificate to get a new passport. Ain't nuthin doin. Maybe --MAYBE-- if there's some change in rules to enable similar people in your situation, but since most of 'em won't have scanned copies anyhow, what's the point?
The real lesson here is not to digitize and encrypt your documents, but to keep them in a centralized location in your house (preferably that's small, waterproof, and fireproof), so you can grab 'em in a hurry, and/or if you have to leave them (at work when the shit hits the fan?), they have a decent chance of survival.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
Okay, you're both an idiot and an asshole. Congratulations.
Nobody said anything about a nuclear war, you fucking moron. Nobody's really afraid of a nuclear war any more. What people are afraid of, and with good reason, are things like hurricanes, tsunamis and 9/11s. In the case of a hurricane, you'll have several days' notice; in the case of a tsunami, you'll have hours. In the case of a 9/11, you'll have no warning at all, but if you're a survivor you might want or need to get out of town after the fact. If the attack includes a nuclear or radiological component, you might need to get out of town in order to be safe.
Hurricane Katrina taught like five million people to be prepared. Here's a guy who's trying to be prepared, and your upbraiding him? You fucking moron. You motherfucking moron.
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.
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.
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 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.
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".
...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?
You are correct.
I accidentally put my pen drive through the washing machine. Then the tumble dryer. It was lovely and dry when it came out, but the USB plug had been broken off the board.
Quick soldering job later and I plugged it in, to find all my data intact.
Definitely more robust than a floppy disk. Comparatively, looking at them in the wrong way was enough to corrupt them at times.
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
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
once you have total failure there is no turning back. electronic information is useless. even paper information is useless. you will be on your own. perhaps it is a good idea to have a plan for the future and forget the past. forget new york, forget everything every man and woman for themselves. or perhaps constitute new tribes based upon mutual colaborations. if you take these things with you you are expecting to come back. but what if there isn't anything to return to.
I just had one of those suckers go through the washing machine a while back. Still works.
I've lost count how many times my little 128 MB Dell has made the trip through the washing machine. It works fine. My 512 MB Lexar drive had to be replaced when I was troubleshooting someone else's computer and it stopped working. Lexar replaced it without any problems. Now, if we had that scale of a problem. Take my advice. Don't worry, don't keep anything on you except your driver's license. You'll be taken care by the red cross and the feds will have declared marshal law and everyone in the nation will be issued biometric ID cards anyway. If your rich, you should have a vacation home in an out of the way local that isn't on anyone's hit list. If you aren't rich, the best thing to do is try not to live in any major high profile cities or political points. I'd think Mt. RushMore http://www.nps.gov/moru/ and The Statue of Liberty http://www.nps.gov/stli/ would be better targets than anything else though.
Goal isn't to kill people. It is to creat mass choas, panic and terror. I'd target New York City's Water Supply System http://www.nyc.gov/html/dep/html/watersup.html rather than the city itself. The panic and terror that would create would be much more than if NYC was wiped off the face of the map.
While I have never had to resort to this as I have never dorpped my falsh drive in water, I am told that submerging it in alcohol afterward is a very good idea. The alcohol displaces the water, is non-corosive, and evaporates much faster than water.
I have used this method in the past with the old buckling spring keyboards... Someone spills coffee in one, you submerge it in warm water with Dawn dish detergent and swish it around a bit, then rinse, then submerge in alcohol (this is back in the day when a keyboard was much more expensive that 4 or 5 bottles of rubbing alcohol) then take it out, let it dry for an hour or two and plug it in. *THAT* I have done many, many times with no problem. Never a short, never a rusted spring.
From Wikipedia:
The majority of the on-board avionics was based on vacuum tube technology, not solid-state electronics. Though the Mig-25's electronics were ridiculed in the West, many experts found it ingenious and quite practical to use vacuum tubes as they were less suceptible to radiation compared to transistor technology in case of nuclear warfare
Besides, if I save my wife, the world gets a quantum chemist with teaching experience. Plus it's in a pretty package. Fall of year twelve we open the first university back up. ;)
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
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.
I agree as well. To paraphrase Machiavelli, Survival necessities can't always get you a gun...but a gun can always get you survival necessities...
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
I've heard the same distorted, egocentric behavior from IT managers in DRP meetings over and over. Back up in 24 hours my ass.
Have you ever noticed the best
A decent rifle with plenty of ammo would be indispensable and worth more than all the gold in the world.
I know that; and you know that, but you'd have to be an idiot to explain it to the guy who's willing to give you ammo and food for gold, now wouldn't you?
The stuff doesn't have any real value now, except for that fact that some people think it does. Read Thoreau's "Life Without Principle." He deals with this very issue in it.
KFG
Yep, I periodically make a DVD and ship it out to family. They get a "family album" and I get some level of backup.
Nobody has mentioned EMP. Those flash drives will probably all be garbage in the case of a nuke, even if you survive.