Creating a Digital Back Up of Important Files

I once talked about organization being very important in our lives and most importantly in our financial lives. One key component to this is having a clear concise means of gaining access to the information you need when you need it. It is very important to have original signed documents that are locked safely away in some fireproof safe but in this very digital age there is another way that we can keep our documents. Instead of stuffing a safe full of paperwork to overflowing we can scan documents into our computer and save them to a very small and portable flash drive. This allows us to have an encrypted and secure means to place our important documents so we can access them easily and on demand. The originals can be kept safe and secure in a safety deposit box and the digital back up can be at home so we can grab it anytime we want. It is also very convenient to store a flash drive since they are very small and compact.

As we go through life we collect various pieces of paper that are very important to our existence. Among these are birth, death and marriage certificates, deeds, life insurance policies, stock certificates, wills, powers of attorney, and the list goes on. In reality how often do we go into these documents and pull them out? The answer is not often. However, the key to these documents is being able to put your finger on them when you need them. Digitizing them is an easy way to do it. Once they are digitized you can put the originals in a very safe and secure place where you can get at them when you need the originals, which is often the only time you will need to get at them.

Digitizing documents is only some of what you can utilize this technology for. I often suggest to my clients to think about taking a video of your home and contents, or going through and cataloguing specific items with a digital camera. This way if anything should happen to your home then you have a specific source to go to to show the item and also the original receipt, if you scanned that in, to show the price of those items. Doing this in advance takes all of the guesswork out of making a homeowners claim down the road. Having access to all of these documents, photos, and other various important items will make it very easy for you if ever you should need them.

Choosing the right digital storage is very important because you will need to find something that has some staying power to make your life easier. Digital media has gone through many phases over the years from the giant floppy discs of the 80’s to the smaller diskettes, zip drives, Cd’s, hard drives, external large capacity hard drives, flash drives to most recently storage in the cloud. Ever evolving and constantly becoming more efficient taking our lives from paper to paperless the digital world brings us virtual filing cabinets and storage that takes up no physical space in our lives. Storing your digital backup on your computer’s hard drive can be very convenient but it does not always make sense. Computers are vulnerable to viruses and crashing so in all cases I will suggest a solid state flash drive to store your documents and as a back up storing them somewhere else that uses the cloud, which is just an external server system housed at various locations in the world. This way your information can be in the original form, stored on a flash drive for your convenience and backed up by external servers so it is always accessible and safe from loss.

Print this article