Getting it Ready to Grab

Last week while I was at work three apartment buildings around the corner from my own were gutted by a five alarm fire.  Thankfully, no one was seriously injured.  (Except perhaps the bruises to the ego of the pitbull who was found hiding in one of the backyards) Still, miraculous lack of loss of life aside, this event has put literally dozens of people out of their homes in less than an hour.  This got me to thinking, what do you save, if you could?  

     The question is as old as fire and cave dwellings, I imagine, but the answers have probably changed dramatically over the years.  Early humans who faced being overrun by fire probably grabbed any uneaten food or simple tools.  Once food became less scarce thanks to agricultural advances, people probably ceased to flee from their burning dwellings with food and replaced it with clothing and other hand-manufactured items that would be expensive to replace.  The industrial revolution likewise would have alleviated the need to grab such consumer items and allowed potentially ignitable humans to escape with more luxurious items such as jewels and early photographs or paintings.  I think it's fair to imagine that throughout most of the 20th century the number one item people grabbed when racing a fire out the door would have been photographs.  I think we are on the cusp of that changing once again, if it hasn't already, because when I asked myself this question, my answer was immediate: "I'm grabbing my phone, my laptop, and an external hard drive and I'm getting the fuck out of there!"

I'm not going to grab anything else because there simply isn't much, if anything else, worth risking so much as a 2nd degree burn for, let alone my life.   Sure, it would be emotionally and financially devastating (though as I look around my place now, I don't even see more than one item I would be truly sad to lose forever) but so long as I were able to save my laptop and all of my personal data, I really wouldn't have suffered any losses that would be difficult to recover from.   Everything truly important is saved in some digital way on a few items that weigh no more than 10lbs. all together.  Granted, I have no kids and have not lived a lifetime in one spot and accumulated all that "life junk" that people so often do, but it occurs to me that even if I did, my list of things to grab in the event of a fire isn't going to change much--provided said offspring is intelligent and strong enough to run in the opposite direction of the conflagration.  

It is extraordinarily unlikely that I will ever have another roll of film developed on paper in my life, and even if I do, I will certainly have a digital backup.  Video and audio recordings like the ones my father  made of me when I was five and then played for every girl I ever brought home?  Yeah, those are going to be digital--and potentially viral!  Every tax form I ever file, every financial statement I ever receive, every sentence I write, most of the books I read, the videogames I play, and the music I listen to will all be on a few pounds worth of silica, glass, and metal.  

Which is all great, so long as  you stay on top of it.  Got pictures laying around that you've been meaning to scan in digital copies of?  Got CDs you've never ripped to a hard drive?  Important hard copies of documents or information that 30 minutes with a Kinkos scanner couldn't fix?  Sure, hard drives can and will fail, but they have become so large and so cheap that there's just no reason not to have a few or four laying around as backups to all of this information.  And while offsite backups are a pain in the ass and potentially expensive (Backup early.  Backup often.) I suspect that in less than a decade, the concept of not having a live, automated back-up service will be a foreign one.  As technology and the number of ways we use it continue to march forward, it's now more important than ever that you get your digital life in order.  You never know when you're going to have to grab it and run with it.