A life on a key chain
Since a few weeks ago I’m carrying my life around with me. My life is worth roughly 4GB and it’s on my key chain.
The 4GB consist of documents, photos and videos which are stored on a very rugged USB Corsair “Survivor” 8GB thumb drive. The thumb drive fits into the USB port of most computers out there and is recognized as a “disk”. Plug it in and a second later you’ll find a new drive on the PC or a new disk on your Mac desktop (Unix is supported as well).
The actual content is stored encrypted on the USB drive using TrueCrypt. Only if I supply the big monster master password will TrueCrypt reveal the real data stored on the drive. The encryption software uses AES 256, which is some of the highest encryption technology that you can get your hands on these days. The password to unlock the content is so long that I had to put it on a piece of paper and store it inside the USB thumb drive to make sure I don’t forget about it (yes, I’m kidding).
I left an extra 4GB unencrypted to be able to use the drive as an easy solution to transport files.
What did I put on it? Scans of important documents: drivers license, social security card, green card, passport, mortgage documentation, car/motorcycle titles, etc. - Photos: I walked around the house/garage and took photos of anything and everything I have in here - Videos: a walk through video where I walk through the whole house.
Why did I put it there? For disaster recovery reasons. If my home burnt down tomorrow I would have a very hard time assembling all that information above from scratch. Some of those documents above only exist in one place and I thought it was time to make sure that they exist in a number of places. All the data above is also copied (encrypted) to few other places on the net whenever I connect the thumb drive. You may also want to call it peace of mind for an aging mind …