The Drive by the Door: Photograph Everything You Own and Keep the Papers Where a Fire Cannot Reach Them

Walk the house with a phone in one afternoon. In each room: a wide shot from the door, a wide shot from the opposite corner, then every drawer, closet and cabinet open. For anything worth more than a hundred dollars, a close-up, the serial number, and a shot of it in place in your house. Add a slow walk-through video narrating what you see. Put it all in folders by room on a portable SSD, with the receipts you can find. It takes two hours and it is the difference between a full claim and an argument.

Scans of driver's licenses, passports, birth certificates, Social Security cards, marriage certificate; home, auto, health and life insurance policies with the policy numbers and the claim phone numbers; deeds, titles, mortgage and loan papers; wills, powers of attorney and medical directives; prescription lists, immunization records and a one-page medical summary per person; recent tax returns; a contact list; and the home inventory photos. Photos of the emergency supplies too, for the same claim.

A rugged solid state drive with no moving parts, small enough for a fireproof bag. I use the SanDisk portable SSD; buy the Extreme model, which has hardware encryption and a password, because the basic model does not, and a drive full of your identity documents should not be readable by whoever finds it. A terabyte holds every photo and document a household will ever produce.

Keep it unplugged in a Faraday jacket, a bag of conductive fabric that blocks the field from reaching it, inside a fireproof document bag. A nuclear pulse is the only realistic threat to a small unplugged drive; a solar storm hits the grid through long lines, not a drive in a bag. The jacket does nothing for a surge that comes through a cable, which is why the drive lives unplugged. The Faraday bag guide covers the rest.

Proof you owned it, what it was, and its condition: the item from more than one angle, a close-up of the make, model and serial number, and a photo of it in place in your home so it is clearly yours and not a catalog picture. Receipts or credit card statements for the expensive things. A dated walk-through video covers condition better than anything, and adjusters accept it.

Three, in three places. The computer at home, which is the working copy. The portable SSD in the Faraday jacket and fireproof bag by the door, which leaves with you in an evacuation. And a duplicate drive or an encrypted cloud account somewhere else, a relative's house in another town, so a fire or flood that takes the house takes one copy at most. Refresh all three twice a year.

Start at the front door with the date said out loud. Walk every room slowly, panning wide, then open every closet, drawer and cabinet and say what is in it: 'top drawer, my watch, my wedding ring, the camera.' Turn over anything with a serial number. Do the garage, the shed, the attic and the vehicles. Fifteen to thirty minutes for a normal house. One video, one date, the whole house.