Disaster Strikes, how do you cope?
The original intent of this was something I'd been mulling over a lot for about 2 years. Data after death was the original topic, but it is a part of a much larger theme of disaster preparedness. The main difference is the presence of physical documents and the digital counterparts.
For this post, the assumption will be that notarized digital documents will be taken at face value. THIS MAY NOT BE THE CASE IN YOUR JURISDICTION.
The idea here is that you gather all the important documents together in one place, and create a digital copy of them. The next step is to secure them, and create a method to retrieve the information as required. This should not be overly expensive, or time consuming, but you will need to revisit this occasionally as it is something that will need revision as your life circumstances change.
The Wall Street Journal has a great list of 25 documents you need to have in case of an emergency. I advise following this quite explicitly, and for the sake of brevity, I'll give the quick rundown of the documents:
End-of Life documents: Notarized Will, Durable power of attorney, Letter of instruction/living trust. Basically, any final preparation documents. Also, it’s a good idea to include identification here: Drivers’ license, SIN/SSN numbers, cover and first 4 pages of passport, etc. I would also include any DNA/fingerprint information that’s been gathered if you have it.
Insurance documents: Life insurance, Car insurance, Home insurance, Business insurance. Also, any documents that stipulate you've pre-purchased funeral insurance and health insurance plans.
Proofs of ownership: Title deed to any real-estate, vehicles, cemetery plots.
Financial instruments: All stock certificates and bonds, all mortgage documents, all credit documents, and any Retirement account information.
Banking Account information: All bank account information including account numbers, types, and locations, management information, as well as any safe-deposit box information,
Tax documents: Keep the last 6 years’ worth of income tax filings, any year-end notices of over/under payment. Also, property tax information for every property owned in full or in part.
Health information: This should have some overlap from the first item. Mostly you should have Durable power of attorney or health-care DPoA, Living will or a state-recognized advanced health-care directive, Immunization records, treatment information, allergy information, prescription information, Physician contact information. This is heading can get quite involved.
Marriage, divorce, death records: This includes any information for domestic co-habitation or common-law relationship documentation. In the case of divorce documents, any supplemental orders for child-support, alimony, settlements that involve division of accounts should be included. Again, this can become very lengthy.
Business agreements: Include items like Condominium Corporation agreements, or other services you contract on paper for.
Supplemental information: This is not strictly necessary, but including contract, account and contact information for utilities, internet/cable television, phone, and other day-to-day items is a really good idea. It does help to have a copy of the year-end bill as well.
A file that contains the login/password credentials (and 2 factor identification details) for each online site used by each one of these items. This file will need to be updated each time you change a password.
At this point, you should have a fairly substantial pile of paper. This should be organized in some fashion, and here is where I can only say it should suit your needs. I wouldn't say everything should be put in a fire-proof safe, but I’ll leave it to your discretion as to what should be filed where. It really depends on your situation.
Digitally, though: in this case, you can have your documents professionally scanned, and converted into PDFs or you can do it yourself. The DIY approach involves purchasing Adobe Acrobat or a similar OCR utility, or going through Google Docs. I won't recommend either method, the pay-for method does make life a bit easier, the DIY method retains security. In either case, you should have all documents scanned, and I'd recommend any identification be scanned separately at high-resolution (1000-1500 dpi), and be secured immediately afterwards.
Once everything is converted, create a file structure based on how the documents are physically arranged, so basically by topic as I've noted above. Annual records should be broken down by year.
At this point, if you've been thinking like a hacker thinks, you're probably sweating more than a little, because you've compiled almost 100% of the paperwork that makes you, you. This is where things will become involved, but once you’ve got it done once, you’re basically set for updating.
Encrypting and disseminating
You should be using something like EncFS to encrypt each file separately, and then save this to a cloud-based drive like DropBox, Microsoft’s OneDrive or Google Drive. This should be replicated across several cloud storage utilities, and a USB thumb drive that you keep on your person. This is useful because it doesn't become an issue of using one company’s product. I typically recommend SpiderOak for low-medium importance files, but until they complete a fully independent security audit, I would be very reticent to go any further.
With EncFS, you have the ability to mount encrypted volumes, make changes to files, re-encrypt the files you've changed and close/unmounts the volumes fairly quickly and easily. The part that makes this much more ubiquitous than just using TrueCRYPT is that the volumes can be accessed on mobile devices using an app like Cryptonite (found on the Google Play store) or BoxCryptor (most mobile OSes).
All this requires (of course) that you use a strong password up front. This means that you’re going to probably want to also use a password manager like LastPass or KeePass as well. This also helps with #11 above as you can store the login credentials for every item, and save the information to a .CSV file that can be encrypted, and re-added when it’s decrypted. It’s also a good idea to keep a copy of your password manager’s files (look for the Portable installation, if available) on your cloud drive in an unencrypted folder so you can get at the information as necessary if there is a data disaster, and you lose local copies.
Once you have stored the electronic files, it would be a good idea to put the unencrypted files onto another USB thumb drive, and store them with the paper documents as backups.
Updating your files
Once everything is set up, it is important to set a time and date to update the information. This should happen at least once annually, and might be a good idea to go with it twice annually. When you receive your previous year’s income tax assessment, and then 180 days afterwards is likely the best time. This should be considered house-keeping, as you will need to go through the items. Don’t put this off because it’s really a matter of 20 minutes’ worth of work twice a year, and it’s very important to make sure you have everything together and cohesive.
