With a little preparation, you can turn your Mac into the ultimate safe-deposit box.
We show you how to secure key data and make it much easier to restore and rebuild your life after a major disaster.

Look, we hate fearmongering in the media as much as you do. Running around screeching, “We’re all going to die!” isn’t going to help anyone. But when times do get tough—whether it’s because of a hurricane, tornado, flood, fire, earthquake, Godzilla attack, or even a sudden illness—having a plan ready to go can save you lots of time, effort, and energy, which you’ll need to swoop in and heroically save the day. Here’s how to make that happen.

Keep It Together. It’s time for some unpleasant daydreaming, folks. If you had to evacuate right now, what would you be scrambling to pull together? If your house and all your possessions were gone, who would you need to talk to and what would you need to tell them to start getting things put back to how they were? If you became incapacitated and a loved one had to step in and run your life for a while, what would they need to know? Start compiling a list.

Original official documents should ideally go in a bank safe-deposit box, or a home safe that’s both fireproof and waterproof (see “Safe Deposit or Safe at Home?,”). If you do get a safe-deposit box, feel free to toss in a CD or Flash drive with additional info, but at the minimum, the Red Cross recommends you keep: birth, death, and marriage certificates; divorce, custody, and adoption papers; passports and Social Security cards; military records; mortgage and property deeds and car titles; stock and bond certificates; insurance policy numbers and contact info; copies of power of attorney, living will, health proxy; and trust documents. Essentially, it’s all the papers in that shoe box stashed in the back of your closet labeled “Grown-Up Stuff.”

But you don’t want to rely on paper documents alone, especially if they’re locked in a safe-deposit box that could be temporarily sealed in the event of your death. (I know, we don’t want to go there, but stay with us for now.) So the next part of this project is collecting scanned emergency documents and lists to stash in your emergency kit at home or in a safe location offsite.

Start with what you’ll want to have immediately handy: Names and numbers of relatives, neighbors, utility companies, doctors, and hospitals. Recent pet photos and microchip information. A list of all financial accounts and phone numbers, and your insurance policy numbers and agents. Scans of birth certificates, driver’s licenses, passports, health insurance cards, prescription and allergy info, and so on.

Then think about what else it would be good to have a copy of in a nice cozy offsite location. Your home inventory, of course. Information on your employee benefits, and a recent pay stub and bank statement. Tax returns (just the 1040 form and state return) for the last three years. Backups of other financial records. Copies of insurance policies. Important online account passwords. A comforting letter of instructions to relatives or loved ones.

We know, that sounds like a lot to scan. It’s best to make a checklist and try to get it all digitized in a sitting or two. The Fujitsu ScanSnap S300M for Macintosh ($295, www.fujitsu.com) can speed things up with its automatic document feeders and two-sided scanning in one pass. But any scanner will work, even the super-small direct-to-PDF scanner from NeatReceipts ($165, www.neatreceipts.com). No scanner? Get thee to Kinko’s.

Export your important lists as dated PDFs from TextEdit’s Print menu.

TextEdit is a good choice for the list-making because you can export dated, keyword-tagged PDFs (File > Print > PDF > Save As PDF) for a snapshot of that moment, and then save the info as an easily edited TXT or RTF file, ably handled by virtually every Mac and Windows word processor in existence.

Your Mac can help you build and maintain an excellent home inventory too. The most obvious choice is a little app known as, ahem, Home Inventory ($22, binaryformations.com), which stores images of each item and can export several types of reports for your files. Bento ($99, filemaker.com/bento) is a personal database that includes templates for tons of projects and tasks, including home inventory—and it’s easy to tweak any template or design one from the ground up.

Personal database Bento has a built-in Home Inventory template.

On the pricier but time-saving end, Intelliscanner Mini ($299, intelliscanner.com) makes inventorying items as easy as scanning their barcodes. It comes with software for managing home assets and separate apps for wrangling your groceries, media collection, comic books, and wine. Plus you can get barcode “asset tags” to use on anything that doesn’t have one (10 come free, and you’ll pay $24 for 100 additional tags).

A “roll your own” home-inventory option is to take photos of your place (inside and out) and all your stuff with a digital camera, describing the items in voice notes or the filenames of the photos, and burn a few copies onto CD. Or do a walkthrough with a videocamera and have a friend play spokesmodel holding up your possessions while you narrate the details. Be a little more detailed than the typical episode of Cribs.

However you make your home inventory, keep a few spare copies—having one for the insurance adjuster could help you get your case settled more quickly in a big disaster. Oh, and on a less-dire note, many people would hate to lose precious family or wedding photos, but those are easy to back up to DVDs, or to Flickr, .Mac, Photobucket, or dozens of other services.

Keep It Secure. Once you’ve gathered your essential emergency info, you’ve got to decide where to keep it. If you trust yourself not to lose it, why not keep a copy on your person? Small, durable flash drives can swing from your keychain, and you can encrypt your data on them by using either an encrypted disk image (see the instructions in “Encrypt a CD or DVD,”) or by using a drive with hardware-based encryption. Lexar’s JumpDrive Secure II Plus ($44.99 for 2GB, www.lexar.com) lets you set up partitions protected by 256-bit AES hardware encryption. Anything you put in an encrypted partition will be unreadable, on any computer, without the password.

Lexar’s JumpDrive Secure II Plus can keep your data encrypted—just don’t lose the password.

If you carry an iPhone (or an iPod touch, or a Windows Mobile or Palm OS smartphone), eWallet ($9.99 in the App Store, iliumsoft.com) can securely store emergency info like bank account numbers, passwords for online accounts, and practically anything else, and it uses 256-bit AES encryption on your data. eWallet users on Windows can sync with a desktop version of the app, and a Mac-compatible eWallet app is planned for late 2008—which will be great, because as of now, thumb-typing all that info into an iPhone can take a while.

Online storage is another great place to stash your emergency information—as long as you’re comfortable that your data is being stored securely, and that the company won’t go belly-up before Armageddon comes. Amazon S3 (15 cents per gigabyte of storage plus transfer fees, aws.amazon.com/s3) is reliable, low-cost online storage meant for developers looking to house large amounts of data, but it’s scalable down to the single user too. The easiest way to use S3 is through Jungle Disk ($20, www.jungledisk.com), which supports Mac, Windows, and Linux and behaves like another hard drive attached to your Mac—just drag and drop onto your Jungle Disk to move files, plus you can set up automatic backup routines.

If you don’t want to pay-per-gig, Mozy ($4.95 per month, www.mozy.com) offers unlimited online storage for a monthly or yearly fee, so you can go ahead and back up everything on your Mac if you can stomach the upload times (dependent on your Net connection, natch). The Mac app makes it a cinch to back up some or all of your files, shows the status in your menubar, and the service, like Amazon, has a solid reputation for reliability. So does IDrive (www.idrive.com), which will even give you 2GB of encrypted storage for free.

CD-Rs and DVD-Rs can back up your emergency information cheaply, but they’re not the most durable media and they can’t be updated, so make sure to schedule re-burns at sensible intervals—at least once a year. That said, optical discs are also compact and easy to mail, so they are a good way to send copies of crucial documents and emergency instructions to a trusted relative or two, preferably one in another area if you’re worried about a disaster striking your region. If there’s anything on there that you’d like to encrypt, remember that you can put basic password protection on a PDF file in Preview: Go to File > Save As, check the Encrypt option, and select a password when prompted.

This “What Your Family Needs to Know” form is free on troweprice.com.

Where to keep your offline backups—your flash drives and discs? Only you can decide. Some places to consider are with a trusted friend or relative, with your attorney, in a safe-deposit box, and in your emergency kit. Places you should rule out right away include crammed between the pages of this magazine, inside the dishwasher, or buried out ‘round back.

Keep it current. If you’ve done everything we’ve outlined here, you should definitely be proud of yourself. But with stuff this important, the key is to set it and not forget it. In whatever calendar app you use, schedule a reminder (or a few) every six months to one year at the longest to review your emergency files and update them if needed. Make sure the right people know how to access this information in the event that you can’t.

Set calendar reminders to keep your emergency plan current.

This all sounds like a drag, but besides the peace of mind knowing that you’ve put in the effort to prepare for the worst, you’ll no doubt discover some fringe benefits too. By reviewing your list of accounts, you’ll notice if any credit card balances are drifting too close to their limits. Maybe you’ll decide to add earthquake or flood coverage to your home or renter’s insurance. Maybe you’ll even finish an exhaustive home inventory and decide, man, I’ve got way, way, way too much stuff, and you can sell or donate some of it.

See? It’ll be fun! While you’re at it, you can review your family’s emergency meet-up plan, check your fire extinguishers and smoke-detector batteries, and have a Beef-a-Roni feast and a stale-bottled-water fight as you replenish the supplies in your disaster kit.

Encrypt a CD or DVD

You don’t even need additional software to burn a disc with 128-bit encryption. Just use Disk Utility to make an encrypted disc image in CD or DVD size, fill it up with all the top-secret files you want to encrypt, and the whole shebang will be locked up with a password of your choice. Here’s how:

1. Open Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility, and click New Image in the toolbar.

2. In the Save As dialog, select the disc size you’re using from the Size pull-down menu (610MB for a CD-R and 4.7GB for a DVD-R). Under Encryption, select AES-128 (Recommended); and for Format, choose Read/Write Disk Image. Name it and click Create.

3. On the password entry screen, uncheck the Remember Password (Add To Keychain) box, because that wouldn’t be very secure now, would it? Just be sure not to forget the password. Click OK.

4. Once Disk Utility creates your disk image, it’s also mounted, and you can drag in whatever files you like. The disk image—along with all the files inside—is locked up as soon as you unmount it; you’ll need the password to get back in.

5. To make an encrypted disc, just insert a blank CD or DVD in your drive (if you’re prompted to choose an action, select Open Finder), then drag the encrypted disk image you just made onto the optical disc icon on your Desktop.

Make an encrypted disk image to hold your files, then drop the image onto a blank CD icon to burn an encrypted disc.

Safe Deposit or Safe at Home?

You’ve got two basic options for safeguarding your pain-to-replace-them papers: a safe-deposit box at a bank or a fireproof/waterproof box or safe for your house. A bank charges you a fee, and you might have trouble getting in after a disaster if the bank is closed or you don’t have the safe-deposit box key. Then again, a fireproof safe at home might not come through either, if it’s not rated for your needs.

It’s perfectly OK to stash a flash drive or optical disk backup in your bank safe-deposit box with your original paper documents. But if you opt to keep that stuff at home, remember that paper burns at 451 degrees Fahrenheit, but optical discs, hard drives, and flash drives fail at much lower temperatures than that, closer to 180 degrees Fahrenheit. A fireproof box or safe rated UL-350 for 60 minutes is OK for paper, because the inside will stay at 350 degrees while the outside is in a sustained 1,700-degree fire for an hour. But for computer media, you’ll need a UL-125 safe, and those cost up to five grand a pop. One other tip: Make sure it’s waterproof too (think floods or water from fire hoses). If the company doesn’t say a safe is waterproof, it’s most likely not.

Other Resources

www.redcross.org
www.ready.gov
www.72hours.org
troweprice.com/getorganized
www.ed.gov/emergencyplan
www.citizencorp.gov
www.operationhope.com/effak