# Prepping / Emergency Preparedness > Bags, Kits and Vehicles >  Personal momentos (Pictures and family histories)

## aflineman

I used to think of my Wife's hobby of scrapbooking as just that, a hobby. Now I think of it in terms of bug-out prep. Here scrapbooks are in a box on the shelf and ready to be grabbed if needed. Many of the photos have also been scanned and backed-up on two portable harddrives, plus some are stored online. She includes family histories in her scrapbooks, and important papers in her scans. We normally take one of the harddrives to her Mom's house when we go on a trip. The other one goes with me to work, and I bring it back home a couple of times a month to update the info on it.
Hopefully this will minimize the loss if anything does happen.

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## crashdive123

The advent of digital photography has made preserving photo's much easier.  I lost tens of thousands of photographs that covered a period from about 1968 until 2000.  I still have the memories, just not the photos.

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## LowKey

Portable hard drive like a flash drive? or a real hard drive with a motor and disk?
At work, I do weekly backups to a portable drive with motor and disk. But all archival material is burned to DVD. A DVD is not reliant on the motor or the flash interface working...you can pop it in any machine. Flash drive would be my second choice but I wouldn't fully load one to more than 2/3 its capacity. Removable media has had a long history of failure when filled to capacity.

After having some things dumped from free online resources for not accessing them for long periods of time, I wouldn't trust something other than a pay service, and only that if they have a notification statement in their contract if they intend to go offline for any reason.

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## Rick

I think backups of any kind are good. Surely much better than nothing. I have backups to a stand alone hard drive as well as backups to a pay service. I also have a lot of stuff burned to either CD or DVD (depending on when it was copied) and a couple of three ring binders of paper. Not all the same stuff, however. The paper copies are mostly medical and survival how to's.

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## vahtryn

My personal photographs from when I was a child are in the process of being scanned.  Just gotta deal with a friend's time table.  With that said everything else I tend to have "memorable" is digital.

There's good and bad regarding this.  If you have no way of powering up a device you can never see them, therefore you pretty much burned the photo album.

If you store everything out in the cloud (I can rant hours about the the cloud as it's what I do for a living) you can also easily lose everything.

I have three flash keys that are all the same.  They have an encrypted partition of everything important that I need.  The rest is so it can boot on just about any machine and be able to use truecrypt to look at the information on there.  Wasn't a tough project.  Once I had one done I just used dd in linux to clone one key over to the next then the other.  Verified and they all work.

One is in the truck.  One is in my every day bag and one is in my jacket that will always be with me.

There are two things that are very important to me that I will try to keep.  They are in easy access.  One is the stuffed elephant my mother bought me when I was around 1 and was the only toy I had for years.  The other is her levi denim jacket that's been rebuilt and restitched more than anything in the world.  They are really the only ties to my previous life when things used to be good.  I always make certain that there is room for both of these items and I know where to grab them should the need arise.

Yeah, I'm in my 30s and I still love that stuffed elephant more than almost anything.

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