“digitize important documents ‘”
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What about the MILLIONS of people who don’t know how to do that-—and I’m one of them?
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Why digitize important documents? Sure won’t help in an EMP attack...fact is you should have copies in a safe place (not bank safe deposit)...more like with a trusted friend or family member who lives close by. ..in case your home is destroyed.
I tried to be a careful steward of my digital assets. A UPS and a Seagate 2 TB NAS running in RAID 0 (mirrored) mode to protect my important assets. Idaho Power had a different idea. Two extended power outages in the last month. First was 1 hour 21 minutes. Wiped out the battery on the upstairs network equipment UPS. I have purchased a replacement. 2nd one went 2 hours 53 minutes last Friday. I tried to properly shutdown the NAS when it was clear the power was going to be down longer than the UPS would support. The NAS would not shutdown. When power returned, I discovered BOTH disks in the mirror were unresponsive. Seagate will honor the 3 year warranty with a full replacement of the disks and enclosure. That leaves me with a substantial "recovery fee" to have their data recovery lab get my data back. Not a happy camper.
This is kind of an aside: Get thee a scanner!
I thought it would be silly to keep a scanner for personal use. Then I started taking care of my elderly relatives. Having scanned copies of my Health Care Proxy and Power of Attorney docs came in very handy.
Now I scan all of my bills and other important docs. I even scanned my license and registration so that even if I leave my wallet at home, I almost always have my phone. I can pull it up and show it.
Finally, if you take an extra few seconds when you do the scan, you can code any document so they are easily recalled for taxes and what not.
A decent desktop scanner is going to run a little over $100 (at least it did when I got mine.)
Every month I burn a DVD with the images, so I have a running log of all of my important docs in my fireproof gun safe.
It is easy to do. Relative inexpensive. And when you get the hang of it, it makes document recovery so easy its scary.
Just some food for thought.