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One of my interests is being prepared for natural and man-made emergencies that may occur in the San Francisco Bay Area. I believe that preparedness should include one's personal finances. Keeping records that are current and available can lead to a quicker recovery and smaller loss.

I have used the Quicken software program from Intuit since 2001 to manage my personal finances. This includes tracking my investments, savings, and monthly bills. Loss or unavailability of Quicken would count as a real emergency for me. For this reason, I make quarterly backups of my Quicken information and keep them off-site

I've decided to use recordable DVDs for my data backups, with the reasons being:

• Highly accessible since most computers contains DVD-ROM drives


• Cheap to produce, at less than $1 per disc (cheaper than magnetic disk drives)


• Resistant to damage from water, magnetic signals, etc (not true for USB flash drives)


• Tamper-proof since the information can't be modified


• Can be encrypted to protect the contents


• Can store up to 8 GB of data, which makes them preferable to CDs.

A popular software program for recording DVDs on the Mac OS X platform is Toast from Roxio. It provides support for encrypted disk images (supported natively in Mac OS X) and disk spanning. I highly recommend it.

The information I include on my backups is:

• VMware Fusion virtual machine of Windows 2003 Server with Quicken program & data


• VMware Fusion installer & serial #


• Home Inventory in Circus Ponies Notebook format


• Home Inventory exported to HTML


• Circus Ponies Notebook installer & serial #


• Text document describing how to use all of these things in a "sh*t hits the fan" scenario

All of these files are stored in a password-protected, AES 256-bit encrypted disk image on the DVD. I'm limited to using a Mac to access my backups, which isn't a huge deal since I have access to Macs at home & work. I make 5 or 6 identical copies of the DVD and keep them in various places that would ensure I'd have at least one copy of the DVD, except in the most dire of circumstances. The encryption is military-grade and is strong enough that I don't lose sleep over not having the disk in my physical possession at all times. It's important to keep off-site copies of this information in case of a fire, theft, hardware failure, or other catastrophe. I repeat this on a quarterly basis since I'd prefer to have a backup no more than 3 months old. Copies of the backups are destroyed one year after creation.

I hope that I never have to actually rely on my backups, but I take comfort in knowing they exist!