For Paperless Paper Preservation

Whether you call them pen drives, thumb drives, jump drives, flash drives, or simply USB drives, these little devices provide you with the ideal means to digitally store important personal papers, family documents and irreplaceable photos.

Many organizations and agencies, including the US Government itself, have advised us to be ready for emergencies.  Everyone, we are told, should have access to an emergency survival kit, and the suggestion has often been made to include in that emergency survival kit important family documents such as copies of insurance policies, identification and bank account records in a waterproof, portable container.

These papers, of course, are not likely to be needed during the emergency, but they may well be needed after the emergency when originals may be inacessible or even destroyed.  Unfortunately, for many of us that list of important papers may be rather extensive.  Yet, how can you fit a shoebox full, or even several shoeboxes full of photos, journals, and other vital documents into the limited space of an emergency survival kit?

But it can be done.  The answer lies in something much smaller than that shoebox, something the size of an ordinary pen knife -- a flash drive. 

These 21st Century devices allow us to store what ordinarily would be unmanageable amounts of paper in a paperless format.  In fact, every family member could have one of these drives safely stored away in their own 72 hour kits, increasing the likelihood that the valuable information from these documents will survive the disaster that might befall the originals.