Before a hurricane, earthquake, flood or other emergency or disaster, one way to prepare yourself is to organize and support your important documents. Losing important personal documents such as birth certificates, tax records and mortgage documents can be the distressing consequence of a disaster.

Here are some useful tips to protect your documents:

What documents to protect?

In case of an emergency evacuation you should have all the necessary identification documents at hand, mainly.

• Personal records (birth certificates, marriage, divorce, adoption and death).
• Passports, driver's licenses and other personal identification documents.
• Social Security cards.
• Leases of property, deeds, mortgages and other related records.
• Financial documents.
• Debit and credit card numbers.
• Medical records.
• Family photos and memories.

Secure documents in the cloud.

An interesting alternative is to store in "the cloud", which allows making digital backups of personal documents more possible than ever for an ordinary person.
Popular services such as Dropbox, Amazon Cloud Drive and Google Drive allow you to store documents in a network of remote servers, which is known as "the cloud", instead of your computer's hard drive.

Original documents and secure copies

You can start making copies and scanning important documents. Keep the originals away from home as in a safe and save the copies, or a flash drive or USB memory with the digital versions, in the emergency kit of your home. In this way, you can easily access the information in case you have evacuated your home.

Make sure you have password protected all the data you have stored to protect against any leakage in case the unit is stolen or lost. If you have the possibility of having a fireproof and flood proof safe you can keep copies of these important records in it.

We recommend you to always be prepared, making sure that a disaster never takes the documents and memories that are most important to you, even if you can not find the originals.